To touch the light, you must pass beneath the shadow.
But what is the shadow? We know it's the darkness
infested region as far away as one can get from Westeros in the
known world, roughly speaking, but that doesn't tell us what it
is or how it relates to the story.
On top of that, there are good reasons to believe that the
shadow lands by a shy are not our best answer for where
Daenerys has to literally go right?
But that may be part of the answer.
That's why we have to dedicate an episode to it, because it's,
it's a little tricky. This belief, rather, this notion
in part, stems from knowing that George made some changes along
the way. He had a plan.
He changed it a bit as he went. The story grew in the telling,
as we all know. We're focusing in on that for
Daenerys and some related stories.
Now, in part, he may have wanted to maintain a layer of mystery
about a Shy and the Shadow Lands, but even as he steered
Danny away from going there directly, he continued to make a
Shy and the Shadow Lands important not just to her story,
as I said, but to other storylines and for storylines
yet to come. As we'll discuss, the Shadow
could be a metaphor or symbol for many things.
For example, doesn't have to be a literal place, but as I said,
it could be both. We'll take a look at all that
and which story elements related to Ash Eye and the Shadow Lands
appear in all the books. Not just a Song of Ice and Fire,
but the world of ice and fire and fire and blood too.
There's a lot to to go on with that.
There's some new things. This episode is dedicated to
these related topics and theories, the potential of what
we have, plus a long look at the region that bears the name
because, well, we want to cover all our bases.
And in Shadow Lands sounds really fun.
We've covered Ash Eye before, but not the Shadow Lands
specifically. So we'll consider Daenerys arc
as it relates to Ash Eye and the Shadow Lands and Quaithe, who is
from the Shadow Lands. She's involved heavily this
episode and she's the one who gave Danny this prophecy after
all. And of course, we only quoted
part of it. She continues to appear in
Danny's dreams, so that's going to be important.
And of course, the shadow lands themselves.
Those who live there are touched by the shadow.
What does that mean? They're masked and mysterious.
We've got magic, we've got Miriam Mazdoor, we've got
Melisandre, we've got Marwin. All that and more on this
episode of History of Westeros Podcast.
Hello and welcome back everybody.
We usually do our live streams on Monday.
This is a special Wednesday live stream.
The usual time we do Wednesday live streams is during ATV
season. This is not ATV season as you
probably know, but we are live streaming on a special day.
It's around the holidays and normally though, like I said,
3:00 Sundays or just catch the episodes later on any podcast
platform or just watch the live stream replay on YouTube.
It is ad free if you listen on Patreon.
However, as a member, shout out to our good friend Nina
Krusling. That's right, no longer Nina
Freel. She is now married.
Congratulations to Nina and James, but she's still a good
queenalley.tumblr.com That hasn't changed.
A good queen alley with 1l.tumblr.com and the latest
blog post over there is on Damon and Lena's child, Lena's death
and childbirth. Specifically.
The child was malformed, so the question is whether this relates
to the problems that some Targaryens have with children
and whether that child was such an example.
If you have questions for us, ask them live during the stream
if you're here for that. Otherwise, hit us up on any of
our socials or at westeroshistory@gmail.com.
I will, of course, mention some episodes, the end that relate to
this one. We do have quite a few ties to
other episodes in this one, and we'll start with our trivia
question, which will also have its answer at the end of the
episode. Which notable character on their
way to meet Daenerys is seemingly not mentioned in
Quaithe's prophecy? You know, the one Kraken dark
flame and all that one that business.
Lady Sophia Valarian sense of super chat says happy holidays
from the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Right on. I didn't know there were
Valarians in Virginia, but you know, the VS flock together.
Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, thank you, Lady Sophia,
and happy holidays to all of you from us.
Let's see, first of all, as I often do, I want to give a quick
rundown of what you're going to have in this episode.
We're going to talk about Danny and Quaithe quite a lot,
George's plans for her, the meta of all that.
It's not entirely within the text, what we know about this.
Then of course, the world building deep dive on the Shadow
Lands and the people who live there.
That's mostly in the second-half and as we have done an episode
on Ash Eye before, many of you are aware it was eight years
ago. Not a whole lot has changed
since then, but we didn't cover everything.
There's things we didn't talk about.
For example, we focused on Ash Eye and now we're focusing more
on the Shadow lands and Daenerys interpretation of the shadow as
it pertains to her storyline. And of course, there have been
some actual changes, though I said there hadn't been a lot,
but there have been some. And some of them, I guess are
fairly significant, which is that, well, Fire and Blood came
out. That's pretty big.
And since Fire and blood is included in the mix, we now have
one, maybe 2 characters that have been to Ash Eye that we
didn't know of before. So we'll talk about that.
We also have a little bit of influences to discuss real life
masking culture will be a brief section in the second-half of
the episode. Little bit of Robert E Howard
comes up in this one because there's some influence there.
And let me read you all the different headers that I've
wrote for this episode. And that starts with the
original plans and the five year gap.
Then the Game of Thrones ash eye recap Quait's prophecy, the a
clash of kings ash eye recap Quait in dreams.
Then the rest of the recaps, which are shorter, A storm of
swords, a feast for crows, a dance with Dragons and the world
of ice and fire slash fire blood ash eye recaps.
There isn't really one for Duncan egg because it's really
only mentioned one time as a just as a throwaway comment.
So there's not much to say there.
Then we'll talk about the shadow lands.
What is the shadow? The Shadow Men, then the IRL
masking tradition section, then we'll talk about some other
song, Bison fire threads, a few other characters that are
relevant, and the Sea Snake and Alyssa Farman.
Let's get to it. The original plans in the five
year gap is where we're starting now.
Of course, the five year gap, to recap, was George's original
plan prior to A Feast for Crows. He planned on five years passing
between A Storm of Swords in the next book, which at the time
wasn't even called A Feast for Crows.
But of course he changed his mind.
Now all the main characters were impacted by the scrapping of the
five year gap, especially the younger PO VS because they
weren't given the chance to grow up.
That was intended as part of the five year gap.
It's not a big deal for Tyrion or you know, Catlin who was
already dead, or later POV characters like Theon or Jamie
or Davos. It matter.
Well, Theon would argue that five extra years in the Dread
Fort is actually quite a big deal, thank you very much.
But you get my point. Of course, the younger
characters, the younger you get with the characters, the more a
big deal it is. Bran was going to be 12, which
is kind of funny because he's still even after five years, he
would have still been very young.
But characters like Danny and Sansa and John and and Sam, for
example, and to a lesser extent Aria, go from teenager to about
20 or maybe 18. So that's a big deal.
Like Danny is 16 now as of Dance with Dragons, roughly.
So she would have been about 21. That's a less of a big deal than
it would be for some of those older characters, but it's still
pretty substantial. And I think it's a bigger deal
for her than it is for John because John ends the the series
or ends the Storm of Swords rather as the Lord Commander.
And you could pretty easily just say, OK, five years of John
being Lord Commander, you know, not, not a whole lot happened.
Maybe that's a little bit of a stretch, but not as much as it
would have been for some other characters anyway.
For Danny, it would have meant being longer established in
Slavers Bay. So that's not going to happen
nearly as much because there's not going to be that five years.
And to be honest, the Slaver's Bay probably isn't as
narratively important as the Wall.
But the big kicker here, yes, Danny isn't as young as a as a
Bran or an Arya, but her Dragons are even younger than Bran.
Even so, that five years of them not growing is a big deal.
And it does relate somewhat to this topic because Asha is such
a place steeped in dragon lore. The Shadow Lands perhaps are the
place where Dragons originated, and thus there's a lot of
knowledge associated with Dragons and dragon lore out
there in the Far East and well, younger versus older Dragons,
well, you can see how that relates at least somewhat and in
other ways that we'll get to. Of course, in the matter of Ash,
it gets tricky. Now, George definitely planned
for her to go there at one point and then changed his mind, but
we don't know if he changed his mind because of the five year
gap or not. However, I'm pretty sure he
didn't, which might surprise a lot of you and it would have
surprised me before looking into this episode.
Now, there were a host of other changes from George's original
conception. There is, of course, the five
year gap change. But if we go back even farther
and look at, say, the original outline, the original plan for
the series, which was of course just a trilogy at first.
Like for example, Joffrey was going to kill Rob in battle.
Catelyn was going to die beyond the wall instead of in the
Riverlands. Jamie was going to become king.
He was going to murder his way to the throne and and Tyrion was
going to be blamed for a lot of it.
So that's that's different. But here was the original plan
for Danny quote. When the moment is right, she
will kill her husband to avenge her brother, and then flee with
a trusted friend into the wilderness beyond Vais Dothrak.
There, haunted by Dothraki blood riders illegible of her life,
she stumbles on a cache of Dragon's eggs.
The birth of a young dragon will give Daenerys the power to bend
the Dothraki to her will. Yeah, there's an actual
illegible part in there. That's why she said that,
because we don't actually know what that word is.
Probably something in fear of her life or, you know, they're
they won't have sworn to kill her.
Something like that. We understand how blood riders
work. The trusted friend that she
would be fleeing into the wilderness would be Jorah,
probably. That was probably a character he
hadn't fully conceived of yet. And of course, no longer is she
carrying about avenging her brother.
So the story we got was quite different.
But you can see a lot of those same elements are there.
The young dragon giving Daenerys the power to bend the Dithraki
to her will. That last sentence really says a
lot. That seems to still be
happening. That seems to still be close to
happening. In fact, at the end of the Dance
with Dragons, she is confronted by Kaal Djoko and 50 of his
writers or so. And it seems to be foreshadowed
that this will end in Danny becoming the Stallion who Mounts
the World, or being revealed as she already is.
I suppose you could say the stallion who mounts the World
dominating the Dasraki, bringing them as part of her army, a huge
part of her army, and going from there.
So was that going to be part of the five year gap though?
Was Danny going to go to Ash Eye during that?
Which would enable George to keep some of the mystery because
we don't see it directly, we only see it through her
flashbacks, which allows him to be a lot more controlled with
what we get. It's not reasonable for her to
be there and just things be omitted.
But if it's her memory, it's imperfect.
It's not happening right in front of us.
He can still conceal some things.
He can tell the story in a different order.
But anyway, that didn't happen. Obviously, she never went, but
it's something he may have considered.
So having it through the eyes of Apov is certainly different than
some other outcomes we could have gotten.
That said, as we talked about in our Melisandre episode, she
might be sort of a mobile ash eye.
She knows a lot about the place. She might be the portal to Danny
to learn some of those things if they ever meet.
Now let's talk about what elements of Ash Eye in terms of
story from a high level, we're introduced in A Game of Thrones
because it's a lot. This is probably the most about
Ash Eye that we get in terms of big grand things happened right
here in this first book. It's pretty wild because I think
it's related to how Danny was going to be going there.
And so she he wanted to set it up even more.
But like I said, even after he turned from having her go
directly there, he still wanted to add a lot of detail about it
and keep it important. So here we go.
Illyria tells Danny her eggs are from the shadow lands beyond a
shy. Now, we have a lot of reason to
believe this is a lie. But the fact that he is
referring to a place that Dragons really did come from,
he's saying, oh, it's just like, say it's like saying this
sparkling wine is actually champagne when it's not from the
champagne region. It's the same thing.
It's still sparkling wine, but he's exaggerating about how
exotic they are. And she because she does hear
Dragons originated there. So it's a it's a lie that is
easy to sell because it could be true.
We hear about ghost grass when Danny is on the Dothraki Sea
basically for the first time. She has a conversation with Sir
Jora about it and they talk about all the different colors
it can be. And then the subject of ghost
grass comes up and it's pretty chilling.
And Danny doesn't really want to talk about it because she's
like, oh, I'm having a good day. The grass looks nice.
Let's not talk about that death grass or whatever, but it's
clearly something that is relevant, right?
And and she's heard about all the magic openly practiced
there. We get a longer version of this
in the world of ice and fire book.
But she thinks during a Game of Thrones about spell singers,
warlocks, aromancers that practice openly and then
shadowbinders and blood mages practice at night like they even
they have to keep some of their magic hidden even in a place
like ash eye. That may not even be true, but
that's what she's heard. And it's a, you know, it's it's
part of the pastiche of knowledge that is out there
about Eshai, part of the what people believe about it.
She sees shadow men and caravans from Eshai at Vaisdothrak and
sees some hideous God statues that Jorah says are probably
from the shadow lands. Something about misshapen God
just instantly, oh, ah, misshapen gods must be the
shadow lands. Like, OK, I guess that is a
thing. But why?
Well, hmm, I don't know. Mary Mazdor learned her
necromancy there her the thing that she did to bring Drogo
back, quote UN quote, to save his quote UN quote life, right?
She definitely did something. There are other shadows and the
dead horse and there was magic for sure.
So she learned it in Aschai and also met Marwin there, where she
learned other things about peeling from, you know, from a
maester. And then after Drogo's death,
Jorah suggests they go to Aschai.
Then again when she built Drogo's pyre, he again suggests
let's just go E. He's not thinking ash eye only
he's throwing a bunch of ideas out there.
Just anything to get her from the path she's on, which even he
doesn't realize at the time is her jumping into the pyre.
But still, he's doesn't like her plan.
Whatever it is, he says Yee tee Karth, the Jade Sea, Ash Eye by
the shadow. Let's go.
One of those places. Even Tywin mentions that Stannis
is bringing a shadowbinder from a shy in the first book.
He doesn't mention her by name. We haven't heard the name
Melisandre yet, but already it's there.
And then, of course, Bran's dream dragon stirring under the
sunrise. Here we go, quote.
He lifted his eyes and saw clear across the Narrow Sea to the
Free Cities and the green Dothraki Sea, and beyond to Vase
Dothrak under its mountain, to the fabled lands of the Jade
Sea, to a shy by the shadow where Dragons stirred beneath
the sunrise. So you can see there's a lot of
set up for a shy in the first book.
Quite a few things there. The Bran bit in particular is
interesting to me because we later learned that Danny's
Dragons are the only ones. Even Quaithe says that.
So what is Bran seeing Dragons stirring beneath the sunrise
for? Is this just a just a kind of
the vagaries of dreams on on That said, everything else in
Bran's dream, we've in this particular dream, maybe not some
of the others, but this one, we can pretty much pinpoint it.
It's all fairly clear which characters are being referred to
get the the giant with black blood.
That's clearly Gregor. He's overshadowing Janie and
Sandor. You've got John turning cold and
things like that. It's all seems kind of
straightforward in terms of what we've seen already, but this
part never really came to pass and doesn't seem like it will.
So this might be metaphorical, It might be just something that
I'm looking too deeply at that isn't as meant to be as deep as
I'm thinking about it. But it could be that George
changed his mind. He intended for there to be some
Dragons in a shy, but changed his mind to make it the only
ones. But that that even that doesn't
seem very likely because by the end of the book, the like the
last line is the sound of Dragons was heard for the first
time. And I, I don't remember the
exact I didn't quote, pulled out a quote exactly, but you know
what I mean. It said it's been first time
it's been heard in forever. So that also seems to argue
against Dragons having been currently in a shy, although
maybe more will hatch because of these ones.
Who know? This is definitely a bit of a a
quirk to this whole angle we're looking at here.
Now. Clay's prophecy, however, is not
in a Game of Thrones. So that's really important, very
important going forward. Keep that in mind.
And Danny has already sailed W before sailing E, right?
Think about this. If you Fast forward to A Clash
of Kings, it's the news of Robert Baratheon's death at the
end of A Clash of Kings that gets her to turn West.
So she's not going to is she going to go back to Ashy?
Was that that was that couldn't have been the original plan for
George. That doesn't make sense for her
him to her to go to Karth, then go all the way back and to
Slavers Bay, which is to the West, and then go E again to
Ashy. Karth is as close as she's ever
going to get. I think that's as Far East as
she's ever going to go. But it's interesting that George
had decided at the beginning of A Clash of Kings.
He surely had knew what was going to happen with Danny that
she was already going to decide by the end of the book to go
West. Even though she doesn't get all
the way West, she gets stuck in Slavers Bay.
She's definitely not heading in the direction of Ash Eye and she
tells Quaithe, as we'll see in a minute, she doesn't have the
intention of going there as soon as the Clash of Kings.
Early in Clash of Kings, she's already pretty much decided not
to go. I think that's a surprise to a
lot of y'all. I think a lot of y'all, again,
self included before this episode.
Thought it was going to be the five year gap.
Was around the time those plants got scrapped.
Let's continue with Quath's prophecy quote.
The woman stepped closer and lay 2 fingers on Danny's wrist.
You are the Mother of Dragons, are you not?
She is, and no spawn of shadows may touch her.
Jogo brushed Quath's fingers away with the handle of his
whip. The woman took a step backward.
You must leave the city soon, Daenerys Targaryen, or you will
never be permitted to leave it at all.
Danny's wrist still tingled where Quaithe had touched her.
Where would you have me go? She asked.
To go north, you must journey S. To reach the West, you must go
E. To go forward you must go back,
and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow.
A Shai Danny thought she would have me go to a Shai.
Will the a Shai E give me an army?
She demanded. Will there be gold for me in a
shy? Will there be ships?
What is there in a shy that I will not find in Carth?
Truth, said the woman in the mask and bowing, she faded back
into the crowd. Recaro snorted contempt through
his drooping black mustachios. Khalisi Better a man should
swallow scorpions than trust in the spawn of shadows who dare
not show their face beneath the sun, it is known.
It is known AGO agreed. So Danny thinks Quaithe means go
to a shy. She says you want me to go to a
shy and Quaithe says you'll find truth there.
So it seems pretty confirmed that that's what Quaithe meant.
There's no like, well, what does she mean by go beneath the
shadow? Well, she straight up says Ash
eye, or at least responds in the affirmative when Danny says you
mean Ash eye. So in this case, it looks kind
of straightforward. However, as I just said, this is
the book where Danny goes West, not E She doesn't go towards Ash
eye. So what does that mean?
Quaithe isn't getting Danny to go the direction she wants.
But later Quaithe is going to keep saying these things.
She's going to repeat this prophecy in a dream or glass
candle. We'll get to that.
And doesn't seem to be like hey, you're going the wrong way.
She just repeats the prophecy and and says a few other things
with it. So it's a little puzzling.
Not in a something's wrong here way.
Not in a this is suspicious for Quaithe way 'cause I do think at
the end of it, Quaithe appears to be the only one of the three
that meets her and Carte that actually has some goodwill
intended. Maybe not goodwill towards
Danny. Maybe that goodwill is towards,
you know, saving the world, preventing another long night.
But Quaith doesn't have a personal goal.
Well, since she's not trying to benefit from this, that's not
greed or ambition. That's driving Quaithe's
messages to Danny. Even if the messages aren't 100%
clear, I think we can tell that she gives her warnings,
communicates with her, tries to steer her in the right
direction, but she's also going to continue to tell her what she
is and what to do. I suppose we should consider the
possibility that that George was of two minds in the beginning of
this book and change his mind by the end of it.
That is possible. And that he didn't, you know,
tweak some of this earlier writing to reflect that.
But I don't really look at it that way.
That's a, that's a rabbit hole that's too difficult to
decipher. If, if he just made some
mistake, Well, who knows? I, I, so I don't really want to
look at it that way because, you know, even though it's possible,
it, it, it's kind of leads us to a dead end.
There's not much we can say about that.
And anyway, I don't believe that too, because it all seems to add
up, even if there's a lot of mystery in here.
So the truths are likely related to this other point that Quaith
is pushing. Remember that you are a dragon.
Remember what you are now. That's the thing that's going to
come up in these other ones that isn't here in this one.
And I think it's related to truth.
Like Danny, you are a dragon. You have to be a dragon.
And as we've seen in a number of places throughout the series,
what that means is you have to destroy, you have to unleash
that fire, proverbial fire in a song of Ice and fire, perhaps.
Now, of course, the other parts of the the prophecy.
Let's talk about that. To go north, you must go South.
OK, Well, I think we understand that to go north, the ultimate
destination of North, the wall slash the others, that's
potentially where her ultimate destiny is.
West is presumably Westeros, right?
You have to go West. You must go E.
Well, she did go E not as far as a shy, but Karth is well, that's
farther than anyone else in the among the PO VS is gone during
the time of the series. Technically Melisandre was
there, you know, before the series.
But anyway, you get my point. That's really far.
Alternative for you? OK, to go north, she has to go
South. She has to go down on someone
there. Gotcha.
Wow. It's the This is the The X-rated
version of This Is A Song of Ice and Fire and Sex.
That's just the book already. Is he?
Yeah, OK. Yeah, you're right.
It's anyway, so ASCII is both South and E it's kind of the
extreme in both of those directions.
So it's the, it's the, it's the the thing that she has to do
first. Some both of these to go north,
you have to go South, to go West, you have to go E Well,
ASCII is the farthest South and almost the farthest east or the
the farthest of both those things.
It's really like a city or anything.
Obviously there's the the continent of Olfos, but the
continent of all those has never even been mentioned in the Song
of Ice and Fire and doesn't seem to have any cities or anything.
So to go forward, you must go back.
What about that? That 1A straightforward
interpretation is, you know, to look back at the past or to
examine the past to learn maybe this truth that that Quaithe is
referring to the truth about dragon Lords, the truth about
the nature of Dragons, the truth about the nature of Valyria and
Targaryens. What's the deal there?
Are they, is there dragon, literal dragon blood in her?
Is that part of the secret? Is that the secret?
But this kind of conflicts with another thing that Danny's keep
saying to herself. Also in book one.
If I look back, I'm lost. OK, well, to go forward, you
must go back. All right?
Well, you you can't look back. You can go back, but you can't
look back. So what does that mean?
One great idea that comes from Nina.
I think this theory's been out there, but she's one of the
first people that I've heard it from, if not the first, is that,
well, she's going to go back to the mother of mountains.
So it's a place she's been to. She's got to go back there.
It's really important. It's been foreshadowed.
It's been prophesied in in one, at least one of her dreams where
there's Crohn's emerging from the lake dripping and kneeling
before her. Well, that clearly hasn't
happened yet, but you can see how it might if she goes back to
Vaes Dothrak and Drogon burns a bunch of calls or a bunch of
enough sufficient Dothraki to make them kneel to her to say,
oh, look at the that's the ultimate stallion right there,
that we've got horses, but she's riding that.
You can see why that would be superior.
Even though they might have trouble accepting a woman.
Burn enough men and eventually they'll you know, they'll
they'll fall in line, I suppose. So that's a very strong
possibility for the go back part.
Now it could be more multiples. George loves multiple meanings.
It can absolutely be both. It can be going back to the
Dithraki Sea, the mother mountains to win the Dithraki
over, to dominate them, to bring them as part of her army, the
main part of her army. And it can also mean looking
back in time into her ancestry and to the origin of her, you
know, people, her culture and all that, and into the
prophecies that are related to her.
The past is where Azora Hai and Nisa Nisa and the first long
night happened. If she needs to learn about
those things, that would make sense if she does, because she's
such a crucial part of the ultimate high magic aspect of
this story. The the big prophecy, the
others, the Song of ice and fire.
Danny is as wrapped up in that as anyone, maybe the most she
might be the character that's the most wrapped up in it.
Now what about to touch the light?
Is that the light at the other side of the ultimate darkness?
Is that the the light in the at the end of the tunnel,
proverbially on the other side of the long night?
Does it mean save humanity? Is it the ultimate destiny of
hers to be this hero, or is it her own death?
Again, this is a chance for both.
Touching the light, as in achieving, you know, going to
heaven. The equivalent of that by being
a heroic figure, by her living heroic life, dying for a great
cause, What better 'cause is there than to save the world?
So, yeah, there's nothing in this prophecy that promises her
survival, but it does. And Quaithe can be ambitious
about saving the world without caring much about what happens
to Daenerys. It's like, yeah, I'm sorry, your
life is not important. And the scheme of things,
Daenerys. Yes.
This isn't about saving my own life or my own personal goals.
But that doesn't mean you come out of this alive.
You know, Queen Danny, Mother of Dragons.
So pass beneath the shadow to touch the light, right.
To touch the light, you must pass beneath the shadow.
What does that mean? To get to heaven, you must go
through hell. That's that's a way to think
about it again, the shadow of the mother of mountains.
This is where she winds the Dithraki that could be in order
to touch the light, in order to defeat the darkness.
She needs to return to these things to claim this army to do
kind of dark things to win them, burning a bunch of them.
That's it's not the most upright thing that for a hero to do, but
it's all in service of a very heroic thing, apparently.
But even at this early point of Quait, even here, even in this
quote we just read that we've been analyzing here for a few
minutes, Danny's already saying, I don't want to go to Ashai.
I don't believe that there's a good reason to go here.
Why doesn't Quaith be more direct?
Why doesn't she say something about what this truth is?
I suppose because Danny wouldn't believe her.
She's like, you got to find these truths for yourself.
You need to learn them on your own or you won't.
You'll just think I'm making this up.
But also, it appears George had already decided by this point
that he wasn't going to have Danny go to Ashai.
So Quaithe is pushing for it. Danny's pushing back.
Ashai remains important, but it remains mysterious by her not
going there. So I think that's where the the
equilibrium George settled on here.
But it's interesting that he had already decided that before
introducing Quaithe, the person that says you have to go there.
Yeah. And it's relevant to that.
She calls herself Quaithe of the shadow.
She's not Quaithe of Ashi. Melisandre says Melisandre of
Ashi, and even Melisandre isn't from there.
Actually, maybe nobody is from there, given there's no children
there, so only transplants live in Ash Eye.
So that kind of makes sense. But it's interesting that
Quaithe's origin is in the Shadow lands, apparently.
I mean, maybe she's just calling herself that, but that would
fit. But another quirk about Quaithe
here that I want to throw out here.
While we're talking about her, she's not from Karthe, right?
She's from the shadow. She wears the mask.
She seems to be from she seems genuinely from there.
I mean, maybe that's part of this whole disguise or way of
just manipulating Danny. Even if she's manipulating her
to A to a good cause. Why was she in Karth in the 1st
place? Did she know Danny would be
there? Did she prophecy that meeting
that that the Mother of Dragons would go to Karth?
Yeah. How did she know that?
That's interesting. And this delegation was her and
Zarozo and Daxos and Piatt PRI Zarro is extremely wealthy and
powerful. Piatt free is not maybe wealthy,
but powerful. The warlocks have their cultural
place in Karth. Their their power is on the
wane, but it's still recognized and a lot of people still fear
them. So it's kind of an odd pairing
of those two with her. You can see why Zarro and Piatt
are there. But what is this Kartheen
prophet doing there? You know, I mean, this profit
from the shadow lands doing there, it seems she's the one
that's a little out of place there.
And that's not in the, you know, not in a way that seems like a
mistake or something. But it's I never really thought
about it in that light before, at least not in this light in
the shadow. Ha ha.
So yeah, I do wonder. But my best guess is is she
foresaw it and knew that's where she could beat Danny and would
be the one place to meet her in person because that's the only
time they meet is in Carth. Those two times or three times
in Carth. And then from then on, it's
dream slash glass candle. Well, we'll get to that.
There's that touch of the hand on her wrist where it tingles
and it tingles later. I don't know what this means,
but my guess is this is how she's able to contact her with a
glass candle. Like like it's like a homing
device, the equivalent of like, OK, I've, I've denoted you, I've
tagged you. Now I can speak to you later
through dreams. Maybe it requires that initial
contact, some sort of like micro spell.
I don't know. I don't know what term to use
for this, but it can't mean nothing that Danny felt the
tingling after Quaithe touched her there.
It's I can't imagine that's just completely nothing, just a
complete red herring, especially given the dreams and stuff
later. And of course, this is where she
says there's no Dragons until you're you're the first born
again into this world. So it seems to confirm that
Bran's dream was not of real Dragons or is something of the
future or the past, unless it's an artifact of of a decision
George to change his mind on. So it's after discussing Ashai
with Quaithe and then Jorah. So she comes in and encourages
her again to go to Ashai and Jorah's.
Like at first remember Jorah was telling her go there, but not
because he thought there's truth for her or there's knowledge for
her there. He just wanted to get as far
away from Westeros as possible, probably so he could have her
all to himself, but also because he wanted her as far away from
her enemies as possible, which is somewhat reasonable, but what
it actually leads her to in this case is, well, OK, maybe not
Asha. I'm still against going there.
Guess I'm going to have to do the House of the Undying.
In retrospect, it's, you know, not the best decision she ever
made, but it is. It was certainly important and
valuable, even though it's it was very dangerous and almost
got her killed. It's the exact sort of thing
Quaithe warned her about too. This is the other thing about
those three that makes Quaithe a little odd is that Zarro is
ambitious for Danny. He wants to marry her, to take
one of her Dragons, if not all of them.
And then we know from the house, the Undying, they were trying to
like, drain her life force, take her drag.
It's not exactly clear, but they intended no good for Danny and
Drogon, I suppose. Now, what happened?
It was a micro version of what we're talking about.
They tried to steal her power, for lack of a better word.
And what did she do about it? She burned it.
Drogon did. Really she didn't.
Drogon did it, but he showed her the way.
He he was a dragon. He doesn't have any other mode.
He burned the threat. He's like, these guys are
coming. They're they're bad news for my
mother. I burned them.
Simple, right? There's no need to overthink it.
Burn them. So I think this is part of
Danny's education. It wasn't what Quaith intended,
but it, it gave her an example of exactly what it gave Danny an
example of exactly what Quaith was talking about.
People are going to want to steal your Dragons.
They're going to want to manipulate you into doing things
with your Dragons that benefit them.
They're going to put the guise of, well, this is where Quaithe
is overlapping perhaps with her own warning, which is she says
people are going to say it's for good.
They're going to say it's for justice.
They're going to say, you know, all these things.
That will try to get Danny to think, hey, this is a good
'cause I'll lend my support to this, like perhaps getting
embroiled to Slaver's Bay, for example.
But basically she's saying avoid all these embroilments and avoid
all these people who are trying to use you like Zaro, like Piatt
Pre. She's standing right next to
them saying like these two guys, beware, I've got your best
interests as heart. No, really I do.
And let me prove that these two guys don't.
And they pretty quickly prove that she was right about that.
And, and Danny never actually like, seems to comprehend this.
She never says. That's pretty much exactly what
Quaithe said. Maybe it's just such common
sense that yes, of course people are going to try to use my power
and manipulate me. I'm the Mother of Dragons.
I'm this powerful figure. Of course people are going to
try to do that to me. Quaithe didn't really tell me
anything I didn't know already. Still, it reinforces the idea
that Quaithe's overall vibe is world saving and not.
I have an ulterior motive here, but again, don't mistake that
for empathy towards Danny as an individual.
If if world saving is on the is on her list here, Danny's life
probably isn't particularly important.
So as I said about Melisandre, that she is a walking part of
Asha. She is the elements of Asha that
Danny won't go to, they'll maybe come to her.
It also enables, again, George to keep Asha more mysterious by
having flashbacks or just filtered information through
Melisandre. Quaith is can still be part of
that too. Quaith probably won't appear in
person in Westeros, though she might.
And and why not? Hey, Quaith, if you're serious
about saving the world, you better you should show up.
Also put your money where your mouth is or your mask is.
But either way, through her, we might learn a little more about
Ashai and, you know, maybe she'll say some other things
besides this prophecy. So I do think that just from
there, just from the Clash of Kings of Game of Thrones
elements here, we get two things To save the world.
You must be a dragon, Dragon save the world.
And that just means, yeah, it's a little counterintuitive.
You got to destroy a lot of things to save the world.
But that's a tough lesson to learn.
It's a tough truth to accept. And that's part of why maybe
Quaithe is a little cagey about it.
OK, so the class of King's Ash Eye recap, if we go through a
lot of what we said, it's a shorter list than A Game of
Thrones. These lists are going to get
shorter as we go through them because, well, you don't have to
reintroduce things that have already been introduced.
And yeah, a lot was introduced in the first book.
So here we go. Melisandre, the Azor High
prophecy. So that's really important
because we, yeah, we heard technically there was a shadow
binder from a shy, like I said, but we didn't have a name, we
didn't have an identity, we didn't have any back story and
we didn't have any of these Azor High prophecy.
That is all a clash of kings. The whole Nisa Nisa Azor High
forging the sword, all that business that comes in book 2.
And then the comet is part of bringing that on because of the
remember the beginning of that prophecy is when the Red Star
bleeds. Yeah.
Also the strangler comes up in this book, A clash of kings.
That's the Strangler is a poison from ash eye so dark purple that
it appears black, appropriately shadowy like the Shadow Lands,
Right. Incidentally, I decided on a
plain all black shirt today in honor of the Shadow.
That's like the Shane. I couldn't think of a time when
I didn't wear some sort of Game of Thrones shirt for an episode.
Yeah. I feel like there might have
been a time you did a plain green shirt for the greens, but
maybe that was Sean. One time. 1 of you guys did do a
plain shirt though. That's our own personal lore
there, Shirt lore. And then again at the end of the
book, Sansa gets her purple necklace.
That of course, doesn't really come into play until the next
book when it's used to murder Joffrey.
But technically it is given to her at the end of the Clash of
Kings. Quait's prophecy, of course,
like I said, also is comes in this book.
We we talked about that a lot already.
So it's important to denote that both the Azora High prophecy and
Quait's prophecy both come in Clash of Kings.
Both pretty early in the book too.
So yeah, Danny's wondering how to train her Dragons, and you
could see why that might relate to Asha.
She wants to learn about dragon lore and there's since there's
no Valyria to learn those things from.
Well, maybe the place that had Dragons before that, even though
it's been so, so long, Well, Shy is still there.
Even if it's she's not going to go there, that doesn't mean she
can't acquire some of that knowledge through other means,
through other people who maybe already learned that knowledge.
Quite possibly the House of the Undying, which we think is
related to Ashy for some. Parts of it because the just
some of the things she learns there are related to what she
might have learned in a shy had she gone there, right?
That's maybe the some of the meta is that a scene like House
of the Undying might have happened in a shy if she had
actually gone there, right, Instead of it happening in
Karth, which is kind of a random place for that to happen, you
know, George had to kind of invent the warlocks and all
that, which reasonable thing to do.
It worked, but it doesn't seem like that was part of the
original plan. He's like, let's rather than go
all the way to shy, we'll go most of the way and do this
other stuff instead. So.
And again, Jorah stops suggesting Ashai.
He just thinks about not staying in one place.
He's more concerned with not setting down roots anywhere
where they where the usurper and his knives can find out where
they are. Of course they also find out the
usurper is quite dead, but that's the last chapter in the
book for her now. Zarro again, actually, though
he's one of the ones Quaithe warned about or the type that he
warned about or she warned about is also against quote such
truce. The Ash Eye E horde are not like
to make you smile. Well, that's not an argument
against it, Zaro. She wants to learn truths.
Those truths might be painful, they might be difficult, but she
needs to learn them. She's not the type to just be
sidelined and live in your mansion and and be wealthy and
sail the Jade Sea. Because as we recall, he did
offer specifically that she said no.
So in the final chapter, which is she only has five chapters in
the Clash of Kings, quite a bit happens in them, even though
it's just a lot of it is in Karthware, which feels like a
dead end in some ways. She has a lot of changed her
perspective and learns a lot of supernatural stuff there.
Anyway, she learns also that Robert is dead and Illyrio's
three ships show up to bring her West.
So it's like explicitly she goes West on these ships that come to
pick her up and she's like, yes. Now of course she does do the
thing that could have wound up taking her to a shot.
Maybe George's original plan was Illyrio's going to send these
ships and she's going to make them go E because what she does
instead is make them go to Slaver's Bay.
That wasn't part of the plan either.
She's she'd still diverts the ships and tells them to go
somewhere that Illyrio didn't want.
It just happens to be a different place that maybe it
was originally planned. Let's talk about Quaythin
dreams. She continues to appear after A
Clash of Kings, as I said, and as you probably know.
But not in person, of course. Here's Danny 3A Storm of Swords
quote. Someone was in the cabin with
her. Eerie.
Jeeky, where are you? Her handmaids did not respond.
It was too black to see, but she could hear them breathing.
Jorah, is that you? They sleep, a woman said.
They all sleep. The voice was very close.
Even Dragons must sleep. Oh, she's standing over me.
Who's there? Danny peered into the darkness.
She thought she could see a shadow, the faintest outline of
a shape. What do you want of me?
Remember, to go north, you must journey S.
To reach the West, you must go east, to go forward you must go
back, and to touch the light you must pass beneath the shadow
Quaithe. Danny sprung from the bed and
threw open the door. Pale yellow Lantern light
flooded the cabin and Eerie and Jeeky sat up sleepily.
This is Quaithe's first dream appearance.
Assuming that's what this is, I do operate on the assumption
that this is a dream that she's appearing in via glass candle.
That's a whole other mechanism we'll discuss another day, but
we'll operate on that assumption for now, with the perhaps
touching her on the wrist thing being how it was all set up.
I like how George wrote this, how she can barely see a shadow,
the faintest outline, and it's a shadow, Clayth of the shadow.
That's cool. I like that.
Now this is the same chapter where Danny claims the
Unsullied. That's what kind of what happens
next year. So she wakes up, she's like
Quaithe, and then Quaithe isn't there.
She's like, well, that was weird.
And then she goes and pulls this awesome move.
In a way, she was a dragon in that scene.
She turns the Plaza of Punishment into something even
more worthy of its name. A hell for the slaver.
She burns the hell out of them, literally.
It's their ultimate punishment. The Unsullied stand there
because then, well, she makes quite sure they understand that
the ownership has passed from them to her.
And, well, they may have been kind of pleased to see what
happened to the Old Masters there, the Krasnismo Naclas and
his ilk. So maybe Quaithe was giving her
the little extra motivation boost she needed to pull that
off, but maybe not. Maybe Danny was quite set on
that plan well ahead of time. And it's because it does kind of
seem like Quaithe didn't need to be involved, like Danny figured
this all out on her own. But it is interesting to note
that Danny's kind of acting the way that Quaithe wants her to,
in a sense, even though she's not going the direction she
wants her to. She's not going to Ash.
I this is not. This is the final nail in the
coffin of going to Ashai, if you want to look at it this way,
because I certainly do. And here's why.
Ashai is a place with no food. It's just, it's a scarce food
environment, but it's the worst place to bring an army.
She just acquires 8000 Unsullied in this moment or later in that
chapter, that's the you're no longer going to Ashai when you
just acquired a large army. Yeah, unless you're separating
from the army, which she does actually separate from the army
later and goes to the Traki Sea. Not to a shy though still.
So you can see how this pushes her even farther from a shy.
It doesn't eliminate it entirely, but it's like, OK,
you've got a big ol army now and they only kind of follow you.
Yeah, they they don't, they don't have their own captains so
much they they're more followers than leaders, etcetera.
That changes a little bit over time, but it's it's definitely a
big point against going to a shy.
So if George wanted her to go there and and still entertaining
it, well, it it doesn't seem likely.
Seems like he changed his mind again before this point, if not
well before this point as we said.
And again, doesn't appear to have anything to do with the
five year gap. Let's look ahead though to A
Dance with Dragons before jumping back because I wanted to
kind of cover all of Coit's appearances at once.
Here's Danny, too, A Dance with Dragons.
Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are burning.
Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the Others.
Kraken and dark flame, lion and Griffin, the sun's sun and the
mummer's dragon. Trust none of them remember the
Undying. Beware the perfumed seneschal.
Resnack. Why should I fear him?
Danny Rose from the pool. Water trickled down her legs and
goose flesh covered her arms in the cool night air.
If you have some warning for me, speak plainly.
What do you want of me, Quaithe? Moonlight shone in the woman's
eyes. To show you the way I remember
the way. I go north, to go southeast, to
go West back, to go forward. And to touch the light I have to
pass beneath the shadow. She squeezed the water from her
silvery hair. I am half sick of riddling.
In Carth I was a beggar, but here I am a queen.
I command you, Daenerys. Remember the undying, remember
who you are, the blood of the dragon.
But my Dragons are roaring in the darkness.
I like a little bit about moonlight in her eyes.
That's neat. The moonlight in her eyes.
It's a reminder of how Quaithe keeps appearing.
Quaithe has Starlight in her mask at one point, and now
moonlight as well. So it's kind of a recurring
little feature of celestial association with her.
You can see Danny's annoyance here.
She's like, yeah, you told me I'm tired of your riddles.
She's already tired of the riddles before this.
But there is a new aspect to it here, of course, this is the add
on the the whole bit about the glass candles burning, the pale
mare, the others cracking dark flame, lion, Griffin, etcetera.
All them. That's the new part.
That's a big part, But Danny doesn't really want to hear it.
It seems like she's not like, let me take notes.
Let me write down those names. See cracking dark flame.
I better, I better, you know, get get each of these
individualized. And she's maybe a little
arrogant about it. She's like, and Kartha, I was a
beggar, but here my I command you.
Like who does she think she's commanding a dream?
Like I don't know about that Danny.
That's it's not going to work. Like that's not the not the
attitude or the the tactic you should take here, I think.
But it is in a sense, it's sort of the right path because she's
telling Danny to take charge and be a dragon.
Remember the undying, remember who you are.
What was the lesson of the undying?
They were bull. They were trying to pull a fast
one on her. The lesson is don't trust them.
The Undying promised you wealth and knowledge and the secret
speech of Dragons and all this stuff.
And it was just a scam. So Quaithe is reminding her,
yeah, don't get scammed. Don't believe this stuff.
You know, focus on the ultimate goal here.
And, of course, what happens in A Dance With Dragons.
She absolutely gets embroiled in Slaver's Bay.
I don't think that Quaithe wanted that It's hard to tell
Danny a person that she wants to save the world.
Presuming that's the case, Sis, you know, hey, don't worry about
all the slaves, you know what do they matter?
It's that's a tough argument against someone who's you're
relying on their generosity on their on their wanting to save
people. You can't say, well, don't save
all these people from this horrible death that you can
actually see and perceive tangibly.
No, no, no. Leave them alone because the,
the real supernatural, magical death is coming.
That's the one you got to focus on.
Like, how's she supposed to know that?
Like, she, she's never seen the other.
She's had a, a dream here and there.
There's been some warnings, but like, this is all very
metaphysical, very uncertain to her.
And, and you can see Danny doesn't really treat it very
seriously either. She's like, yeah, I, I, I know,
Quaif, why don't you speak more plainly?
I'm tired of this. So she's focused on what she can
see, what's what's more tangible to her, which is Slavers Bay is
awful. Slavers Bay is full of, well,
slavery. And that's about as awful as it
gets, especially their version of it.
So be a dragon again. Well, that's how she dealt with
the Undying. If Kwaitz is saying don't get
embroiled here, maybe what she's saying is, well, you should.
Well, maybe embroiled is the wrong word because you should be
broiling all these people. Do what you did at Astapour,
just burn them all. That's like kind of what the
Shavepate is kind of saying to do.
Maybe listen to him, you know, because there's actually bigger
and more important things, which is, you know, hard for her to
accept but might be the truth. And again, it could be a warning
because the warlocks came seeking revenge, right?
We know that Piatt pre gathered his remaining people together to
enact revenge on Danny, but we know that Euron has absconded
with them. Does Quaith know that?
Maybe I think so because she doesn't say, hey, the warlocks
are coming for you. She does say the Kraken is
coming for you. And that doesn't mean she knows
that Euron has stolen their revenge and that he has the
dragon egg and all that stuff. Anyway, that's a whole another
story, but it it's it's related for sure.
So I think it's again, it's just you could definitely interpret
this scene as Quaithe saying stay focused on the core mission
and don't forget that you can solve a lot of problems by
burning them. It's not the most high minded
solution. And you kind of do wonder why
Quais doesn't just straight up say that like just burn more
things. You know, maybe because Danny
wouldn't listen if she if if Quais said things like that,
she's like, I'm not going to take advice from this person
that just preaches devastation as an answer, that it's going to
take Danny learning or coming to terms with some things maybe to
accept that actually devastation might be the answer to at least
some of these problems. But she's young and maybe thinks
that there's other ways to do that.
Time may prove her wrong, but Quaith may be also telling her
you don't have that much time. Now there is one more Quaithe
appearance, although it's arguably, is this an appearance
or is this Danny's imagination? Well, that's part of what we
have to think about here. It's out on the Dothraki Sea
quote. Off in the distance, a wolf
howled. The sound made her feel sad and
lonely, but no less hungry. As the moon rose above the
grasslands, Danny slipped at last into a restless leap.
She dreamed all her cares fell away from her, and all her pains
as well, and she seemed to float upward into the sky.
She was flying once again, spinning, laughing, dancing, as
the stars wheeled around her and whispered secrets in her ear.
To go north, you must journey South.
To reach the West, you must go E.
To go forward, you must go back. To touch the light, you must
pass beneath the shadow. Quaith.
Danny called. Where are you, Quaith?
Then she saw her mask is made of Starlight.
Remember who you are, Daenerys, the stars whispered in a woman's
voice. The Dragons know, do you?
So again, she's in deprivation here.
She's not sure she's hungry. She's kind of reviewing a lot of
what's happened to her. Like there's a later scene here
where she's thinking about what Jorah said and she's kind of
having a debate with Starlight Jorah or just Celestial Jorah.
She's kind of, and then she also does the same with Visceras.
So she's kind of talking to the voices in her mind.
Not that she's like going crazy, but she's starving and she's
having conversations with the people that objected to certain
things she did and she's now thinking about why she's where
she is. And maybe it's because she
didn't listen to that advice. And again, you just see this
point is driven home. It's separated by many chapters
with other characters and even many books.
But Quath just keeps saying the same thing.
She says the whole NS, pass me, the shadow, touch the light
stuff and remember who you are, the Dragons, etcetera.
You're a dragon. It just keeps over and over
being that. Whether we understand what that
means, I'm not 100% sure, but we certainly have pinpointed that
there's not a lot of variation here.
Quite the saying the same things.
Now she added on that bit about dark flame and cracking and all
that, but that's just she ends that with trust.
None of them. It's a repeat of the same
warning she already gave. It's just more specific.
She's saying don't trust anyone and then in a later warning she
just gives specifics. She says crack and dark flame.
Those are guys you shouldn't trust first.
She's like Zaro and Piatt pre whisper now these other people,
pretty much nobody can she trust.
It's no one is really on that same path of of saving the
world. That's not a path most people
are on, right? They're they're just out for
themselves. That's that's most of humanity,
right. Those people aren't that willing
to die for for everything or for everyone.
So this is where I think a lot of the narrative purpose for
Ash. I was shifted into these dreams.
It's still there. Quaeth is the representative of
Ash. I she's from the shadows.
She's got these prophecies just like other plot lines are driven
by some prophecies. You know, there's the ghost of
high heart, there's people like Amon and trying to avoid ones
that are specifically related to Danny, but they're even because
Amon actually is related to Danny, but they're like
literally related to her. But you know what I mean?
There's other there's other prophecies too and other things
that have been predicted that came true.
So I think that's we can see evidence of that here where we
still get the influence of Ash Eye, but it's through these
characters and through the magic of Ash Eye and the shadow lands
rather than through direct contact.
And again, we have this mask of Starlight.
Remember I pointed that out a minute ago with the with the
moonlight in her eyes. Again, the mask of Starlight
too. And in the first example, there
was stars as well. So Danny's dreams and and Quaith
have this recurring sort of setting to them, I guess, or
certain details that repeat. Now, to be fair, when Danny also
had her fever when she was after the big moment where she goes
into the tent where Jorah carries her into the tent, she's
been hit by a rock. And obviously Mary Mazdor is
doing the sorcery and then Rago dies.
So she has that vision, which is an extensive dream that it's
like a a vision. Then the phrase don't want to
wake the dragon, a vision. Then the phrase want to wake the
dragon, then a vision, then to wake the dragon, then a vision
wake the dragon. So it's like that word game
where you remove a word from the beginning of the sentence and it
changes the meaning each time until it coalesces into wake the
dragon and it's her. And because she in the same
vision, it coalesces or climaxes with her back rips open, wings
burst forth, she flies and there's like the shadow of her
wings. And yes, it actually uses the
phrase shadow. Can't help but be reminded of
the scene Game of Thrones, Yeah, where she has wings behind her
back, to be clear. Yeah, that's a very good one to
think of because it it definitely illustrates this,
what she was probably seeing in her dreams.
And yeah, that was a cool moment in the show.
So again, those supernatural ancestors, this is that dream
she's having the dream of the ghost with pale swords and
silver and platinum hair and gemstone eyes of various colors
that very much seem like they might be her distant ancestors.
We've talked about that separately.
These might be ancestors older than Valyria.
They're saying the same thing. They're the ones saying wake the
dragon. Also, they're they're kind of
quafing her here. They're kind of doing the same
thing. They're telling her to be a
dragon. They're telling her to know who
she is and they're telling her to destroy.
They're telling her to burn, and this is the shadow before the
light. This is the hell before heaven.
This is exactly what Koait was saying.
But again, nothing says she will be alive to see it herself, that
she will be part of this new world that she maybe is, is
helping create for for the rest of humanity.
Now here's where I want to return to that because yes,
we've talked about that dream before, the fever dream,
especially the ghostly ancestors, but I want to talk
about the part that comes just after it because we have a
connection that isn't explicitly Ashai, but I think because those
ghosts are associated with ancestry that might date back to
ancient Ashai, we should consider it.
So here's the end of that dream, right after the Gemstone
Ancestor ghosts part quote. The door loomed before her, the
red door so close, so close. The hall was a blur around her,
the cold receding behind, and now the stone was gone, and she
flew across the Dithraki Sea, high and higher, the green
rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in
terror. From the shadow of her wings she
could smell home. She could see it there, just
beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms
to keep her warm. There.
She threw open the door. The dragon.
And saw her brother Rhaegar mounted on a stallion as black
as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the
narrow eye slit of his helm. The Last Dragon.
Sir, Jorah's voice whispered faintly.
The last, the last. Danny lifted his polished black
visor. The face within was her own.
After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the
fire within her. And the whisperings of stars.
So there you go, another example of the whisperings of stars.
Again, the celestial setting for her dreamscape.
This leads to her feverish in and out sleep where she asks for
a dragon egg to kind of settle her.
And eventually she realizes, oh, my son is dead.
That's, you know, the red doors at the beginning and the end of
the stream. And it seems to be the red door
is not her ultimate fate. Her dusty wants the red door
represents home, but she's not going home.
Behind the door was her brother believing he's the last dragon,
which is actually her. And well we know what happened
to to Rhaegar as well. Almost everyone in this vision
dies. We've got Drogo in this vision.
He turns to ash. Viserys, he gets gold poured on
him. Rhaegar his heart burst into
flame. The the pale ancestor ghosts,
they're long dead and Rhaegar now, not her, she's alive and
not Sir Jorah, who's also in the dream and at least he's not dead
yet, but he is kind of out of her life, at least for now.
So the chapter begins with wings shadowed her fever dreams.
That's the first line. So you got wings shadowed again.
The shadow of wings is just is a very constant refrain and it's
comes up multiple times in that chapter alone and let alone
elsewhere in other chapters. So there's quite a few
references to that. So we have that and the telling
of her to be a dragon and again be a dragon in service of the
world, destroy to save the world.
Doesn't sound right, but we can see it.
I think she seems to come to terms with it.
She hasn't acted on it yet because this coming to terms
with it is in her final chapter in the dance with Dragon.
We haven't had another chapter from her yet.
So we haven't seen if this seeming acceptance of the
decision or of this reality is going to translate into
immediate action or what. We don't know yet, but it it, it
seems meaningful. It seems like it might be a big
turning point. Let's let's look at it.
Here's the quote. She's no longer seen Quaist.
She's seeing Sir Jora at this point.
You took Marine, he told her. Yet still you lingered to be a
queen. You are a queen, her bear said.
In Westeros it is such a long way, she complained.
I was tired, Jora. I was weary of war.
I wanted to rest, to laugh, to plant trees and see them grow.
I am only a young girl. No, you are the blood of the
dragon. The whispering was growing
fainter, as if Serjora were falling farther behind.
Dragons plant no trees, remember that.
Remember who you are, what you were made to be.
Remember your words, fire and blood.
Daenerys told the swaying grass. Yeah, she says fire and blood.
It's like she accepts it. She's like, yeah, I know what
they are. Again, this is more explicit.
This is more specific. It's not just be a dragon.
This is Dragons. Plant no trees.
This is Dragons. Don't watch things grow.
This is I wanted this. I wanted home, space-time.
No, that's the answer to that. You don't have that.
You can't have that. That's not your destiny.
That's not what this world has given you.
You have a duty, and you can see she's rejecting it.
She doesn't want that, she says. I wanted to rest.
I wanted to laugh. Plant trees, see them grow
Quaithe, I guess kind of maybe perceives this or did perceive
that and it was part of why she gave her A Little Dream kick in
the butt to be like, remember who you are.
I remember what you got to do go E you got to go West.
I said it all that that's why she says the same things and
annoys her with that. But you can see here it looks
like maybe Danny has accepted it took her being in a bad state,
which maybe was important. She's no longer trying to tell
Quaithe what to do. She's not a queen out of the
Dothraki Sea, at least not with the same level of authority,
even if she has her dragon. But men changed her perspective.
Nothing like having no food and thinking you're going to die to
change your perspective, right? She's wrestling with her
decisions via these ghosts. She's thinking about the
mistakes she made or other paths she could have taken and
realizing that, well, this is the path that she has to take,
that she's got to be Daenerys the Destroyer, not Daenerys the
Mother of dragon. Well, she can be both, but
ultimately she has to destroy. It seems that many will have to
pass beneath the shadow to see the light, right?
It's not just going to be her. She's going to have to lead
other people through that hell to perhaps see the light, the
heaven on the other side. Not everyone will make it.
Returning from a Europe trip, we, Shea and I went to Spain.
It can be kind of difficult to get back into your routines.
You know, it's a time lag, and just being somewhere else for a
while just throws you off. You know, I probably don't have
to explain the concept, but yeah, one way that we deal with
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It can really help organize your day, can tell you when to start
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That's a big problem for me. I'm not a very focused guy.
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about this, even if it's like in the cause of doing work, you
know, I read all sorts of things that might relate to this
episode that I ultimately decided that's a little too off
the beaten path. But in some cases I found stuff
that did help. Rise is really helpful with to
me in parsing all that I'm saying, Hey, obviously looking
at Facebook isn't going to help me.
But if I'm looking, if I'm reading scholarly articles and
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Rises like, hey, don't do, don't look at Twitter, don't look at
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is, I use it to do the flip side too.
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And Rise will be like, hey, it's been like 2 hours and you
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been helping us with. Also want to remind you all to
check out me on twitchtwitch.tv/history of
Westeros. We play Crusader Kings Three
with the Song of Ice and Fire mod.
It's extremely detailed, well made.
My folks are currently playing House Corbray.
We are. We've changed the religion so
that we really value ancestor worship.
And then the game has a little feature where you can
occasionally have a a child born that is of like is the spitting
image of their grandmother or grand a grandfather or some even
farther back ancestor. And then they they acquire
qualities of that character. It is kind of like a little bit
of a reborn, like a reincarnation thing on a minor
scale. And that's been particularly
fun. I'm hoping for, you know, a
reborn Gwaine Corbray or something like that.
That's the guy who was in the Kingsguard that fought Damon
Blackfire. But maybe other things are in
the cards for us anyway. twitch.tv History of Westeros
every Friday at 6:00 Eastern. It's a lot of fun.
Help me make decisions, help me name my children and my kingdoms
and all that. It's great time.
Let's get back to it. The A Storm of Swords ash I
recap. As I said before, these recaps
get shorter and shorter as we go.
That's why I'm going to do several in a row here.
The only little bits here we've got Mance's cloak.
He gets his cloak sewn up with a bit of red silk from Ash Eye,
and it's symbolic of the uniformity and the lack of
freedom and independence that's inherent to being a member of
the Night's Watch, something that Mance didn't really have
the choice in when he was young. He, of course, is was born into
the Night's Watch. He wasn't really someone who as
a adult said, yes, I want to join.
So for him it was. Yeah.
Anyway, so Ash Eye is kind of an interesting association there.
And it's kind of neat to see just the extreme opposite ends
of the world there when something of from Ash Eye
appears beyond the wall. Well, that's that's interesting
because they're so far apart. But also red silk in greater
quantity shows up beyond the wall on the body of Melisandre.
She's wearing red silk and she shows up later in the episode or
in the in the book. So there's that.
But that's at the end of the book.
In between we have Euron, who was introduced.
We don't see him, but we hear about him.
And one of the things people say about him is, oh, he's been to
Asha and back. And that is a serious mark of
badassery. Like, oh, this guy's done that.
OK, then that's significant, especially among the Ironborn,
but amongst a lot of people, that's a big deal.
We actually have the resolution of Sansa and the black amethyst
from Ashai, which of course kills Joffrey.
Yep. So that's there.
That's Hashai playing a little bit of a role there.
Indirectly. Of course, there's that Quaithe
appearance we mentioned, appearing right before Danny
seizes the Unsullied or claims the Unsullied, And then, as I
said, Melisandre to the Wall. So even though it's a larger
book, there's less about Ashai. Danny very explicitly becomes
embroiled in Slavers Bay, right? So yeah, she intends to go to
Westeros afterwards, though, as Quaith tells her, many people
are coming to her. And even though Quaith says
don't trust any of them, well, some of them know things about
Dragons that might be something Danny can make use of.
Even if he doesn't. She just shouldn't trust their
goals or their ambitions. She might trust their knowledge
about Dragons or about other related topics of Tyrion in
particular. Like Tyrion tells her something
about Dragons. I would trust that if Tyrion's
like wants to get Casterly Rock or, you know, wants you to kill
the Lannisters, well, maybe think twice about that, although
maybe that's still the right play for her.
But you know, consider Tyrion's his own side of this.
So what what she doesn't mention, though, is Marwin.
Quaithe doesn't mention Marwin in in that in her prophecy.
So that's interesting. That's the one person among
among all those mentioned that's actually been to Ashai.
Now Makoro maybe has, I don't know.
So but setting him aside because we don't know for sure that he
has Marwin's definitely been to Ash Eye and Quaith doesn't
mention him. So all the people she mentions
that are coming to Danny, she says don't trust any of them.
She leaves him out. Is it because she can trust him?
Is it because she has been to Ash Eye and Quaith actually
knows him? Or is it because she's not aware
of it? Or I mean, maybe he just isn't
going to get to her ever. Maybe Marwin's going to just his
ship is going to sink. I really doubt that.
That seems unlikely that we would be introduced to this
character for him to do so. Very little.
He has revealed almost nothing about anything he knows.
All he's basically done is sort of wax on about how the maesters
have this anti magic conspiracy and how they would have killed
Eamon if he had said more things about prophecy even though they
didn't do that to him. Marwin somehow is above that for
some reason even though everybody talks about how he's
associated with magic. Now that I'm doubting him, I'm
saying though, maybe he's exaggerating.
Anyway, it's a very big omission.
It's really interesting that that he's not included.
Why didn't quite mention her? Him, maybe.
Maybe because George hadn't decided that Marwin is going
there. Now, technically Marwin didn't
get added into the mix for going to Danny until A Feast for
Crows, but the character Marwin existed since the Game of
Thrones. Let's not forget that that
character's name was dropped by Miri Mazdur in book 1.
So even though maybe George hadn't figured out exactly what
he was doing with Marwin, he absolutely created that
character, a maester archmaester, although maybe he
wasn't one at the time. Whatever, doesn't matter.
He went to Ashi. That's important.
And so there's somebody else that went to Ashi that could get
in the mix with Danny and tell her things about it.
So again, we've got another person that can be Ashi on the
move rather than her going there.
So yeah, I really wonder, does Quaithe know Marwin?
That'd be interesting. He probably not.
I mean, Ashi is humongous, so yeah, I don't know.
I doubt they just know each other by coincidence, but you
never know. And of course, we've mentioned
Melisando. No reason to recap that in terms
of her place amongst this group of characters who can teach
Danny about things about Ashai. The the difference, of course,
her being a POV character. But George is still probably
going to be sparing with her chapters.
She's probably not going to have a lot of them.
The Feast for Crows Ash I recap, right?
There's only three bullet points on this one here in in my notes.
Dragons in the Shy, Dragons in Karth, Dragons in Marine
Dothraki Dragons, Dragons freeing slaves.
Each telling differs from the last.
That's from the prologue. That quote.
All those are sensible. Dragons in Karth.
Yeah. Danny was in Karth.
Dragons and Marine. Danny's in Marine Dothraki
Dragons. OK.
Danny's on the Dothraki Sea with Drogon.
That makes sense too. Dragons freeing slaves.
Yeah, obviously. Dragons in Ashy, though, is the
first line of that sentence. That one hasn't happened.
So it's it's a little unusual. It's a it's a line of note or a
a phrase of note. I'm like Dragons in Eshi or
where did that come from? Danny hasn't gone there.
She's given no hint she was going to go there.
She didn't talk about going there.
She didn't. What is this?
Does I forgot which character saying this.
Is it Rune or Molinder or whatever in the in the prologue?
I don't think it's Sorella. I mean Alaris.
Alaris. Yeah.
It doesn't matter which one of them saying it.
The point is, where did that particular part of the rumor
come from? How did Ashai get in the mix
here? I think it's George's is being
deliberate there to to keep it in the mix and to remind people
that there's a big association there.
Speaking of reminding people, a feast for Cross has the King's
moot. And when he's pitching himself,
you know, selling himself to the Iron Born, he's like only one
living Iron Born has sailed to Ashai and back.
That's me. And of course, he also mentions
Valyria and these other things. So it comes up at the King's
mood. And this is where I want to take
a a slight aside to, to consider Ash Eye in the Shadow Lands as
its place in the world and less as a part of Danny's story,
which is that all fantasy stories and of course even our
real world had this in ancient times when people had a concept
of the end of the earth or the ends of the earth.
Now in Westeros it's it really is just the end of the earth
because to the West is nothing. Now we know there's got to be
something, but the conception to Westerosi is that there's
nothing, right? Only someone like a, a sea Snake
who didn't actually really try or and Alessa Farman who
definitely did extremely rare example, maybe the only rare
example other than that one Stark Lord who vanished going
West. So, yeah, so Ash Eye is our one
example. It's the end of the Earth from
the perspective of Westeros. Yeah.
If you go to ET, it's not it's it's their neighbor.
And to the Ash eye from their perspective, which we don't
really have take out the really we don't have that.
I'm sure they know what's E, right.
At least if they have some idea of it, it that the world doesn't
just end there. It's not like a flat world with
everything just drops off. Well, maybe it is.
I doubt it. There is a horizon in this
world, so it's certainly round. Maybe it's like round on one
side and flat on the other. It's like a like a sled upside
down. I don't know.
Anyway, that's part of why Ashai is able to keep coming up
because anytime you want to mention the farthest point away
you can think of, it's Ashai. That's the association there in
world. And someone's like, well, to the
ends of the earth. Well, you mention Ashai, you say
Ashai, you don't say. The five forts, you don't say
the Gray waste, even though those would be valid things.
It's the place that people know about is Ash Eye, because it's a
port. People actually sail there and
go back and forth from it. It's the one in the few places
over there that has both a really dark and unusual and
mysterious reputation, but is also a place that people go kind
of regularly, at least some people do.
So that keeps it in the vernacular.
People will talk about it, think about it.
Ships come from there. Ships don't come from the Gray
Waste, Ships don't come from the Five Forts, Caravans don't come
from there. They're they're information and
sites that are way less known to Westerosi because Westerosi
sailors don't go there and play. People don't come from there to
go to Westeros either, like the Aishahi do now in the Dance with
Dragons. It's a little longer than if
he's for crows, but again, not very much.
Tyrion finds some Ashayi wine in the cellar.
Like, that's pretty minor, right?
And the galley that delivered him in the barrel of wine, which
was not a, he wasn't in an Ashayi wine barrel.
But the galley that delivered him, Illyrio says, is on her way
to Ashayi even now. It will be two years before she
returns. So in other words, the point of
him saying that was, hey, Tyrion, don't worry about people
saying you're here because the ship that brought you here,
those folks are already way the hell on the ocean.
They're not going to tell anything.
And even if they do, it'll be years from now.
Melisandre's chapter. Now, one thing I notice about
her is that when she's at the Wall, she's called Melisandre of
Ashai more often like her. There's the red woman, there's
just Lady Melis. There's a lot of, she has a lot
of names, a lot of ways that people refer to her, but the
name Ashai gets mentioned a little more often.
And of course, she drops a really big knowledge bomb in her
chapter about it. Not just that she's from there
or lived there for a while and all that other stuff, but that
it's the second most powerful place she's ever been in terms
of actually boosting what she can do with sorcery and illusion
and all that. It's the hinge of the world
concept. She says the Wall is the
strongest place she's ever been, but Asha is the next.
So there's that. And of course, in Dance with
Dragons, there's the two appearances of Quaithe, one in
the dream early in Slaver's Bay, and then the one at the last
chapter, which might not be a real vision of Quaithe, might
might not have actually been Quaithe appearing to her.
Might have just been her imagining Quaithe like she
imagines Viserys and Drogo and this and Rhaegar and Jorah in
that same scene. So yeah, Quaithe might fall in
that category there still. So a few other examples.
It continues to be an expression of the known world there.
It's it's from Westeros to Ashey is a phrase that gets said
because those are to a lot of people, the two ends of the
world. We hear things about the traders
circle and the jade C circle that that involve the final stop
basically being Ashey. It's like the the ultimate port.
And once you trade it Ashey, it makes sense, George, put a
little thought into this. It makes sense that you would
want to go home, that you would consider that that the the
stopping point, the final farthest point you want to go to
because it's so wealthy. Yeah.
You can trade food for gems and gold at a better rate than
anywhere else in the world. It makes sense that once you do
that, you're ready to go home. You just got your biggest, best
part of your profit on your journey.
Time to go home. Yeah.
Use that wealth, turn it in, make it, spend it, you know,
give it to your family, whatever.
Now. Yeah.
So again, they know more about the region than Westeros does.
And where our perspective is very Westerosi.
A good example of this is the Summer Islanders.
When we again, we talk about Alyssa Farman, we learn and the
Sun Chaser, we learn that the Summer Islanders very likely
know a lot more about Sothorios than they've told other people,
if not other places around the world because they are an
experienced and excellent sailing culture.
So this is what I'm talking about.
Like they know about some of these regions at the Westerosi
don't same applies to the shadow lands, the people of Ashi all
that they would know a lot more about their part of the world
that we're not Privy to. So I did say at the beginning of
the episode, there's only like 1 mention of Wes of, of Ashi in
Duncan Egg. And it's, it's that phrase
Westeros to Ashi like the the widest world.
You know, it's an expression of east of the Mississippi, You
know, this is the best grits east of the Mississippi, the
best pizza West of the Mississippi.
It's the any the best you'll find from Westeros to Ashi.
Yeah, that kind of phrase gets said like a merchant will say
it's the finest leather from Westeros to Ashi or something
like that. Now to egg on the 5th did send a
mission to Ashi to learn more about Dragons, to learn about
how to hatch his eggs. He was obviously very concerned
with hatching his eggs, and this comes after many of his
ancestors also were very concerned with hatching eggs and
tried a variety of things, none of which worked of course.
And of course, Aegon the 5th was probably the most intelligent of
all these, yet his attempt was by far the most disastrous and
and horrible. But it's interesting that he
tried this, and it's interesting to consider.
Did the things he learned from Aschai mislead him into this
accident somehow, or did he learn the wrong things?
Was he misled or did he misinterpret it?
It passed through multiple hands.
He didn't go himself. He didn't travel to Ashi
personally. So if information came back to
him, well, maybe it wasn't reported accurately.
Who knows? There's a lot of possibilities
there. It's interesting to consider
certainly that the tragedy is related to perhaps some false
information he got or misinterpretation that may have
come directly from Ashi. Now, of course, there's lots of
world building here that gets mentioned in the World of Ice
and Fire. That's, that's a big part of how
Ashi is dealt with there because it's that kind of book.
It's a, it's a history book. It, you know, it's a bit of an
Atlas in this sense without as many maps.
And one of the things we learned that was very new to us is that
it's so big. It's bigger than what King's
Landing Bravos and and Volantis to combined.
It's enormous, but the population is scant.
You could probably, it's probably not even 110th full.
I guess it's not even one 100th full.
We also learned about the lack of children and animals.
That wasn't known to us. We learned about the Ash River,
which it has fish that you shouldn't eat because there's
something wrong with them. They're mutated, magical.
It reminds me of Mantaris sitting right outside the
disaster zone of the Doom of Valyria, where the people and
the animals aren't quite right. This is kind of similar.
So we have these sort of, maybe not parallel cataclysms, but
something very supernatural happened to maybe a dragon
riding dragon, knowledgeable culture that permanently
affected them, even it destroyed them or reduced them and left a
permanent impact like a Chernobyl type radiation zone in
a fantasy setting, whatever that means, some sort of lingering
magic that continues to harm and affect and mutate and whatever.
So yeah, there's similarities between Valyria and the Shadow
Lands, even if it's not necessarily a volcano situation
in both, it might be. I mean, the Shadow Lands are
mountainous, so it could have been a volcanic situation there.
There's just also some magic mixed in, right?
There's just, it can't only be volcanoes.
That just which is pretty much true for the Doom as well.
So yeah, Alyssa Fireman and the Sea Snake, those get both get
mentioned in Fire and Blood. Those are completely new
characters. Well, the Sea Snake isn't new as
of Fire and Blood, but his journey to ash.
I was right. That wasn't really mentioned in
the World of Ice and Fire. So we learned that he goes there
and we'll talk about that a little bit at the end of the
episode here. It's one of our final topics and
Sam will do with Alyssa Farman and the sun Chaser because those
are related. But let's talk about the actual
shadow lands. So they're basically a
mountainous peninsula. Say I should have a map up here.
Like I said, farthest E you all probably knew that, but it's
extremely E We the map just cuts off.
It's not like there's a body of water there that that separates
it. No, we just don't know what's
past it. And I mean, there is a body of
water near Ashley because it's on a little peninsula there, but
most of the map is land getting cut off there.
Other than those little saffron straits that runs between ulfos
and Essos, the mountains of the Morn dominate the area.
That's kind of a funny name for because it sounds like the
morning. It's MORN not MOURN, not like
there's no, it's not like mourning the death of people,
but it's funny to call it the mountains of the Morn when the
whole region is shadowy. It's like there's no morn here,
there's no morning. It's all darkness and shadow.
Or is it? Is that is it a nickname?
We don't even know the nature of the shadow.
We'll we'll get to that shortly. Some theories on that.
On the other side of the mountains of the Morn is the
hidden sea and on the South side of the hidden sea is Carcosa and
on the north side is the city of the winged men.
Quite a name. Farther N is Bone town, and now
the shadow probably doesn't stretch as far as bone Town, but
it would indirectly impact them. I mean, because you got, you're
living next to the shadow and well, you would be dealing with
people from it, you'd be aware of it, you'd trade with it
probably. But Carcosa and City of the
Winged man, are they in the shadow?
Maybe I, I would guess yes, but I could see that the shadow is
maybe just limited to the peninsula of Ash Eye where the
ghost crosses. But I don't know, I feel like
there's some impact there. It may be an older impact.
I don't know. But I, I would lean towards yes
on that, which might mean the hidden sea is impacted.
It might have some of the same problems that the Ash River has,
which is the whole, the water's not safe.
The fish aren't safe. The creatures aren't.
Yeah, just the whole thing is supernaturally off.
The Ash River does go from the mountains of the morning to the
Jade Sea, where I guess the water becomes more normal out in
the ocean. There it passes through what's
called the Veil of Shadows, which is a a narrow pass that's
so narrow that it's in shadows at all times of day except at
noon only when the sun is directly above it.
So these are some very narrow crevices.
So this is one reason for the darkness is just that the
mountains are so smushed together that they don't allow a
lot of light to get through. So it may not be that there's
just this big pall of shadow over everything.
It's just, there's just lots of mountains that they're pushed
together a lot and you creates a lot of shadow.
I prefer it being more supernatural than that, but it's
possible this adds to the whole effect of the region.
And it seems like that there's a place in this veil of shadows, a
city of the night called Stig Eye.
It's a corpse city that even shadowbinders fear.
What? Right.
We've talked about Stig Eye a little bit, but here's some some
things that I don't think we mentioned before.
Demons and Dragons live in nearby caves, which, again, that
doesn't really add up. What are demons in this world?
What does that even mean? The one example I could think of
for something demonic is the voice that Virus refers to in
the blue flames. But Virus might have made that
whole thing up or exaggerated it.
We didn't see that. You know, It's creepy, that
story of the voice answering. I mean, that is a good story,
but part of what makes it good is that it's so convincing that
some people like Tyrion, don't even really think much if it's
true, even though Virus is quite the liar, quite the accomplished
liar. It's just he just tells it in a
way that's so believable and meaningful and he sells it so
well anyway. But the more important thing is
Dragons. OK, again, there's no Dragons
other than the ones that Danny has just burst, hatched,
whatever. So I think that's just maybe an
old story. Dragons used to live in these
caves and maybe those are the ones that Bran was seeing in his
vision from a time immemorial or the future of the past.
Now Stygian of course, is an ancient Greek term meaning
associated with the river Styx slash goddess Styx, because the
river is itself a goddess or herself is herself is a is a
river. Now the closer association, even
though that's the real world association is Stygia of Robert
E Howard, which is the Nile in his world, because in his world
this is Robert E Howard, creator of Conan, the true father of
sword and sorcerer. Yes, before Jr.
Tokian, he's not nearly as famous, but he operated well
before Tokian. So Tokian made it way more
famous. He was far more successful, but
Robert E Howard got started first.
Conan the Barbarians to this day, still very popular, has
been a ton of other authors have written Conan the Barbarian
stories. George loved them.
They're quite well written, actually.
I like them. I'm very fond of them.
They're not like high literature or anything, but I think they're
very strong. And it's fun to see the the the
father of fantasy at his craft. So.
Yeah. So in his world, there was a
cataclysm that turned the river Styx into the Nile.
Eventually the world was reshaped.
His ancient Egypt came out of that right?
So that's his thing now in his Stygia is a theocracy ruled by
sorcerer kings. These rulers are white people
who descend from the conquering dynasty, while the general
population are brown skinned and and worship the snake God Set,
which is an Egyptian deity. So that's that's the connection
there. But the racial makeup is
presumably borrowed from what happened in the real world.
During the time of Alexander the Great, the Egyptians were
conquered and then when his empire was carved up, it was the
Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Egypt for generations.
And they were, you know, olive skinned or white folk from
Macedonia ruling over the mostly brown skinned Egyptian.
So that that's where that comes from.
Almost certainly George loves to borrow from real history, but in
this case, he borrowed a little bit of real history, but mostly
from a guy who used fictional fantasized versions of real
history. It's like borrowing is like
multiple levels of meta here. An older author who also
borrowed from real history to make fantasy.
Yeah. Anyway, that's pretty cool, I
think. But also around the Shadow
Lands, we have a few other features to examine here.
There's Othos, which is the unexplored, undetailed continent
South of Essos. It's very close to ASCII.
We can assume the ASCII know things about it.
They've traveled there. Maybe there's missions into the
jungles. Maybe there's wealth in those
jungles like Sothorios. I kind of doubt it's as
dangerous and nasty as Sothorios because it's just so dangerous
and nasty in Sothorios. But I don't know, maybe this is
George RR Martin's world he likes to create, you know, lots
of dangerous locations. Nice wild.
Another wild untamed cotton is entirely possible.
Those saffron straits, that name implies wealth saffron in the
real world it was like one of the most valuable ancient
spices. So I think in a setting that's
got the feel of ancient to it or in a semi proto medieval
Saffron's probably worth a lot. So it does kind of reflect on
the the wealth apparent to Ash eye and the wealth that may have
a wealth that may have once been much greater.
They still have the gold and the gems now, but imagine when they
also had like political power and a Navy and an arm and
armies, if not Dragons and a a full population and farmland
which probably existed before the ghost grasped and whatever
the shadow is probably what wrecked this civilization and
may have made it unsustainable. Right.
You lose your ability to grow crops.
That's going to crush an empire pretty quickly.
The whole empire can't feed itself anymore.
It's not like they had a lot of other places they could get food
from either apparently, at least as far as we can tell.
Where are they going to get it from?
The again the Gray waste, the the plains of the Jogos?
Nayi, are they going to overrun the jungles of Ye T and start
turning that into farmland? I don't know.
It's not so easy to do, to turn jungles into farmland.
It's it's a slow process. There's a there is a little
island called Ulos or Ulos or Ulas I don't know how to say it.
No one's ever said it. It's only written on the map.
It's a little island between Essos and Althos.
There's a ruined city on it. I don't know how we don't know
how old that is. If it was something that was
part of the great empire, the Dawn.
Maybe it's a trading partner, Vashi in ancient times.
Fun to imagine it as sort of an an ancient dragonstone.
Completely theorizing here just pulling that out of nowhere.
But like if Ash Eye was a great city of dragonlords, this little
island could have been like a a little hold out a little
fortress for the the ultra wealthy, ultra rich, or some
particularly powerful dynasty or family.
There's also the Manticore Isles, seven islands West of Ash
Eye that also probably were trading partners or subjects or
maybe the whole the the roost of pirates that operated back in
the day when there would have been more piracy because of a
full civilization operating here and lots of ships going here
back and forth. So these are all different
possibilities that could happen. Let's cast our mind back to the
misshapen statues and base Dothrak that Jorah says are
probably from the Shadow Lands. So they would worship some
misshapen strange gods there. Very Cthulhu esque.
I guess that's that's what I'm reminded of whenever I think of
dark, kind of scary gods. I think of that world or that
setting. But we know caravans come from
there that like it's kind of weird to think to do this Rocky
go all the way to Asha to take these gods away.
That seems a little strange. So I I don't really believe that
that's too far for the Dithraki to go.
And the Dithraki aren't like some ancient people that have
been ranging far and wide for for eons.
No, the Dithraki are kind of a recent phenomenon in terms of
dominating and conquering their area.
And they were not very powerful in the time of Valyria.
So I don't really buy that they some Kalasar rode all the way to
Asha and dragged those statues all the way back through the
bone mountains. That's I think they probably
stole them from someone else who stole them.
Or they were perhaps a relic of an even more ancient time when
the great empire of the dawn was large enough to have built some
of these shadows much farther away from the proper city of
Asha. Maybe they were built even on
the other side of the bone Mountains and and the Dothraki
stole them from there. The Dothraki did wreck a lot of
cities and took a lot of statues, so maybe there were
gods of the Shadow Lands, statues of them in, say, the
Kingdom of Sarnor, which is where the majority of the
Dithraki pillaging and destruction happened.
So that's that's entirely possible.
Either way, we know caravans come from the Shadow Lands.
That's what Danny was confronted with or met in Vaistothrak.
Those were caravans going back and forth all the way from the
Shadow Lands to Vaistothrak to the Mother of Mountains.
And that would involve passing through the Bone Mountains and a
lot of other regions. So that's a lot of stuff.
They've got very valuable goods there, though.
They can bring gems and and sell them for, again, cheaper than
they can get anywhere else in the world probably.
And these are markets that otherwise wouldn't have access
to this preponderance of golden gems.
I mean, who's bringing huge amounts of wealth all the way to
Vaes Dothrak? Well, these guys are maybe not
all in one single caravan, but over time you've got good deal
on sapphires, good deal on rubies, good deal on emeralds,
just repeatedly. And then it'll add up over time,
right? And you think about where that
wealth comes from. It's not coming from Ash Eye,
the city proper. The mines where these emeralds
and rubies and diamonds or whatever, they're not coming.
They're not literally inside the city, even though it's huge
enough. I could believe there's mines
inside the city 'cause it's so gosh darn huge.
But most of it most certainly comes from the mountains of the
Morn. These the wealth that is
probably controlled by various clans or factions within the
Shadow lands, of whom we know very little.
These masked entities, these groups that we we don't know how
to define these groups. Are they tribes?
Are they clans? Are they towns, villages.
What do I even have there? We don't know.
All we know is the Ash Eye, This big, mostly abandoned city.
Certainly there have to be other smaller things nearby.
They just aren't on the map. Another trade good from ash eye
that comes from outside the city is amber, which is kind of neat.
Amber is kind of rare. It's usually more associated
with the north. So I assume there's maybe some
colder places in the mountains where that comes from.
Amber doesn't. I don't think amber is is common
or happens at all in warmer weather, but I'm I could be
corrected on that. I don't know that one very well.
So maybe those same caravans that go to Vase Dothrak would
also go to places like the city of Wingatemen and Carcosa Bone
town, assuming those places aren't hostile to the shadow
man, which is also possible. Imagine something more fearful
than the shadow lands. Like no, we don't go.
We're the shadow man and everybody's scared of us or
shuns us. But even we don't go to the Gray
wastes because the shrikes those are even worse.
Maybe I don't know that I'm just it's just a possibility.
The shrikes do kind sound do sound worse than the shadow man.
I would guess that the, the, the, the lizard people or
whatever those things are that live in the Gray waste or worse
than the shadow men. I mean, they're, they're not
even human. Probably at least the shadow men
are probably human or mostly human.
And what about sources of food, though?
Are they getting again, the shadow lands most likely is a
place that is tough to have lots of crops.
And yeah, the ghost grass is an issue.
The the sky might be dark. That's bad for crops.
So food is probably a big problem there.
There might be there might be cannibalism.
Maybe they eat the shrikes. They're so hardcore.
They're like, no, we're not. We're not afraid of the Gray
waste. Shrikes are food.
Lizard people. Good eating.
Yeah. Bone town.
Any meat left on that bone? Yeah.
The shadow man, they're looking far and wide for food.
But let's let's talk about a little more of the nature of the
actual shadow. Like, is it just dark there
again? Is it about the mountains being
close together? Is it some kind of permanent
haze? Is it like a Mordor kind of
place? The Mordor, of course, is Lord
of the Rings. It's like a volcanic landscape
that it's this one particular mountain Mount Doom am on a
Marth is constantly erupting and spewing ash into the sky.
So it just it's the land where shadows lie.
It's in, you know, semi permanently encased in in shadow
because of the volcanic gas that's blocking the sun.
Is that what's going on here? Something like that would make
sense. It's obviously well known that
George is majorly influenced by Tolkien.
So yeah, it could just be that could explain the shadow could
be ash blocking the sun, volcanic ash.
Not a shaya over there. She's not blocking the sun.
But even if that's the case, there's got to be a supernatural
element to it. Even if there's a natural
element to it, some of its natural, some of it's got to be
supernatural. Because again, the Ash River
with its weird fish and the magic and the lack of children,
something else is going on. Maybe the lack of children and
animals can be explained by disease or or unhealthy
conditions, but nothing explains the the river, the Ash River,
and and the corpse city, whatever that even is.
I mean there's that's pretty hard to to say.
All of this is just rumor in the game of telephone.
Especially when we know for sure that huge amounts of magic are
practiced inside the city. So it can't all be contained
within the city. In fact, we know it's not, for
example, Mary Mazdur. We're going to talk about her
again in a minute. But just as a preview of that,
she said she learned her necromancy spell from a blood
mage from the Shadow Lands, not from Ash Eye, from the Shadow
Lands. Maybe in Ash Eye is where she
got the lesson, but the mage was born somewhere out there in the
mounds of the Morn or by the Ash River.
And the Ash River kind of reminds me of the the Brimstone.
Yeah, that has a bit more of a natural explanation though, just
lots of sulfur. But still, it's a a place where
only the locals can survive. If you're not born there, it'd
be real hard to adapt to it. It has that vibe to it.
So Mantaris, the Brimstone, lots of maybe familiar and Valyria,
of course, these are these are all parallels with respect to we
know more about those things than we know about what the
nature of the shadow is. But these are these are the best
comparisons I think we have. So yeah, Danny isn't going
there. So we seek these metaphorical
answers, these these for the references in her chapters, or
at least shadows that aren't the shadow by a shy.
But we're still interested in it from a world building
perspective. For the sake of knowing and
again, for perhaps the sake of other stories, I think that we
might get a show about the sea snake and well, the Sea Snake
show would is going to want to go to a shy.
That's one of the coolest places they could go.
And that's explicitly written about.
He did apparently go there. Same maybe with Alyssa farmers.
There's there's a lot of potential there.
What if we get that EET show? Well, Ashai's their neighbor.
The shadow men are have sent like reavers and pirates into
EET. You know, again, this isn't
necessarily some central authority doing it, but there's
Raiders, reavers, pirates that live in the shadow Lands and
they attack more civilized nations like ET, at least in
current times. Who knows what happened back in
ancient times. So yeah, what what what
happened? Was it a magical fallout?
I think so. I think it was a magical
fallout. But the question is, was it an
accident, like a self-inflicted thing, or was it like the Doom
of Valyria? The the predominant theory, at
least in my mind, is the one that says the sorcerers of
Valyria that were keeping the force of the volcanoes at Bay
was undone by assassinations of too many of those sorcerers.
Perhaps the hands of the faceless men or helped by the
assassination. They were they were definitely
killing some of them killing some of each other.
The different houses of Valyria from what we're told.
But the faceless men may have tipped the scales to the point
where it caused the doom. Either way, the doom certainly
has a supernatural element to it as well.
So, but if it wasn't self-inflicted, which is we,
that's a tried and true like trope for some ancient powerful
civilization is that they wrecked themselves.
It was an internal struggle or a failure of their own arrogance
or pride, like like Valyria that caused their own ruin.
Because it's maybe a little more satisfying or more interesting
than some enemy did it to them. But that's definitely possible.
However, I mean, what enemy? Well, who destroyed the Great
Empire of the Dawn? We're told the Great Empire of
the Dawn was destroyed by the Long Night.
That's what wrecked it. So if it's self-inflicted then
we're we can maybe imagine that. Well the great empire, the Dawn
also had a role in causing the Long night.
That would make sense. I imagine that's the
intersection of the mountains of the morn type imagery, the night
and the morning and and shadow and light.
Like all of that is very tied together, right?
Yeah, you're right. That's that is the dichotomy
there. It's everything there is
associated with those two halves, mostly the shadow, but
also, you know, sometimes the light has is the opposite.
You know it stands in that in that contrast.
Got to have the light to have the shadow.
That's true. Melisandre says the shadows are
are servants of relore because they don't exist without light.
It's an interesting argument by both Melisandre and other Red
priests, and by George RR Martin.
So yeah, what enemy could have done that to them?
If it was an enemy ET ET was the supposed successor state that
followed the Great Empire of the Dawn.
The Golden Empire of UT picked up after the Long Night.
But it doesn't make them the cause or the enemy that
inflicted the shadow upon the the region of Ashai.
But it does give us there's a lot there.
There's magic, Dragons, massive wealth.
It is gives us context for just how powerful ancient Ashai and
or the Great Empire of the Dawn was.
If you were trying to design A rich, powerful city.
It's perfectly placed. It's on that peninsula, so it's
perfectly situated for trade by the the wealthy sounding saffron
straits, all the gold and gems that I keep mentioning.
So they just have everything. They have everything going for
them. Supernatural power, probably
military power thanks to the Dragons.
Probably naval power on top of that, but maybe they didn't even
need that. But probably that was there too.
And all the wealth, the trade, just everything until the
shadow, you know, ruined it. So yeah, because we we're not
assuming that you built a giant city after the shadow fell on
that region. That would be weird.
Like, yeah, let's build the biggest city in the world in a
place that can't grow crops. That doesn't make sense.
In a place that's permanently shadowed or whatever.
A place surrounded by ghost crass.
That's the worst place for a city.
But if you imagine it without the shadow, it's like the best
place. Valyria was kind of similar in
that regard, and it's what makes it, again, a a compelling
parallel. It had a lot of those same basic
elements right in the center of the known world.
It's a peninsula that sticks out, makes it great for trade.
They've got powerful nations that are not as powerful as them
in every direction that they can enrich themselves in, and they
take slaves from every direction.
And of course, they also have vast wealth to pull out of their
own mountain ranges that were close by.
They have the silver and gold mines that we learn the faceless
men sort of became came to being in, Right.
So that's that's very similar. And of course, the long standing
parallel of both these very powerful civilizations likely
collapsed because of some sort of magical fallout or accident.
Yeah. The Doom, the doom came for
Valyria and the Shadow came for Ash Eye.
Yeah. The idea could have been yes, if
we're looking at it from the perspective of whoever this
enemy was, if it was an enemy you can make you can make sense
of it like a weapon because it was awfully perfect.
Maybe the shadow is a self-inflicted wound, but it's
just so perfect to ruin them without destroying it.
It's the the region became so food deprived that you can't
support this powerful civilization anymore.
Everything was left standing for the most part, it seems, but the
people just couldn't live there anymore.
It's a really interesting way to have a civilization fall apart
or lose its ability to maintain its power, its grip on the
region, if not the world. It wasn't destroyed entirely
like Valyria. It was undone by the destruction
of the land around it. That's destruction of the land,
right? The ruining of the region again,
the supernatural devastation of it.
Yeah. So maybe the Long Night
originated there and there's a remnant of it still.
Maybe the Long Night still lingers in there.
That could be the the explanation for the shadow.
Or the shadow was pushed back everywhere except in this one
spot where it first originated, where it has its most strength,
where it first started. And you could never be fully
purged, or at least not with the means available to the people of
that region. They don't know what to do
anymore. So much time has passed.
Yeah. Because again, another, another
piece of evidence that it's supernatural and is that a
natural disaster wouldn't linger like this for thousands of
years. You know, it'd be one thing for
to to linger for even a decade or two.
But and then we have ghost crafts.
What what else is says supernatural than that?
I mean, it's very blatant, right?
And it seems to be getting worse.
The the return of magic, the return of Dragons, which could
be an association. Here we get this quote, this
very alliterative quote. Ghost grass grows in the garden
of Gahan. What does that mean?
Does that mean it's growing there where it hadn't grown
before, or it had been dormant and started growing again?
So ghost grass is power powered by the magical energies of the
world. And if magical energies are on
the rise, then ghost grass feeds off that and grows.
So it's interesting to think that if Dragons coming back to
the world have restored magic to the world and the ghost grass is
growing becomes because of that, then it's Dragons are part of
the problem. They're they're they're
indirectly causing ghost grass. That's interesting to consider,
but we also have no idea what causes ghost grass to grow in
the 1st place. We just know it's an affliction
around Ash eye in the shadow lands and we're not entirely
sure how far it goes. Does it reach up into Carcosa
and the city of the winged men, for example?
That's a question we have. If the shadow is in that area,
then maybe the ghost grass is too.
Or maybe the other way around, maybe ghost grass has slowly but
surely crept up to that region. You know, like at the rate of
the moving of the continents. Or maybe something a little
faster than that, something very slow.
Because, you know, if we assume that the shadow is 10,000 years
old or more and ghost grass has originated around the same time
or at the same time and it's slowly grown like, like George
tells Danny, it's doing like one day ghost grass will cover the
entire world. It seems like we're a very, very
long time from that unless, of course, it starts growing a lot
more rapidly. But at its current pace, it's
growing very, very slowly. And I definitely wonder just how
far it's permeated into other regions.
And are there people who've taken note of that?
They're like, Yep, I've been living in this region for 30
years and ghost grass was on the other side of that Crick.
Now it's on this side because that's, you know, that's how the
shadow Landers talk. They they speak a little bit
like Southerners from the US. Yeah.
So there there's a lot of possibilities there.
It's it's one of these sandboxes.
The shadow lands are a sandbox of mystery and and magic that we
don't have a lot of answers on and we may never get more, but I
think we'll get some more. I don't we certainly won't get a
lot of firm answers. We're definitely going to be a
lot of it's going to be left shrouded in mystery, but I
definitely think we'll get more the people that live there.
This is something I think is super interesting.
Yes, we've talked about the people of Ash Eye and the people
of Shadow Lands and not the same thing.
It's like saying, well, people in New York State aren't the
exact same as people who live in New York City.
There's things they have in common, but like rural and city
people or urban people, there's differences there.
And it might be the differences might be larger in a place like
this where, well, there's the shadow.
It's it's just the whole ball game is different.
Now we know that there's no children in Ash Eye, but there's
got to be children in the shadow Lands, right?
Like this. They can't.
There wouldn't be people at all if there's no kids in this
region, right? It just doesn't.
That's not sustainable. Like only people move there.
Why would anyone move there if it's that toxic?
And what do they, what do the locals think of ghost grass?
What do they think of the actual shadow?
Is it a religious thing? Is it a sacred thing?
Is it something they have to live with?
Is it like they view it as something they deserve because
of this I'll the sins of their ancient ancestors?
Is it is they have a prophecy about the day.
You know, one day the shadow will fade, the light will
return. Do they think ghost cross is
going to consume the whole world one day?
Is that just a Dithraki thing? Maybe the Dithraki got it from
these other cultures who are much older than them.
So yeah, there's got to be towns and villages not on the map, but
to the scale to the scope. Like what does a Shadowman
village look like? Is it really tiny?
Or is it like the wildlings, the free folk where they have they
live in very small enclaves and there's almost nothing that's
anywhere remotely the size of a city other than Ash Eye itself.
It seems unlikely. If there was a great powerful
empire a city, there would be some other at least ruins that
people could live in and repurpose at least part of the
way. It seems unlikely that Ash Eye
is the given. It's so huge.
There's no other cities in the region besides that one city on
Ulos. Seems unlikely, right?
But I do think that a lot of them probably live in the
mountains, which those might not be ruin cities.
That might just be, you know, caves and stuff, whatever you
can find. Maybe there's lots of mushrooms
growing in those caves. There's a food supply that might
be viable in that area. And again, the scarcity of food
would be a lot of would have to do with a lot of where people
choose to live in that region. So again, as I said a minute
ago, there's characters from Ash Eye and character from the
Shadow Lands. And here's where we see the
difference, illustrated in a Danny chapter quote.
She enjoyed watching all the people too.
Dark, solemn Ashayi and tall pale Carthine.
The bright eyed men of Yee Tee and monkey tail hats.
Warrior maids from Baisabad, Samiriana and Kayakayanaya with
iron rings in their nipples and rubies in their cheeks.
Even the dour and frightening shadow men, who covered their
arms and legs and chests with tattoos and hid their faces
behind masks. So we don't know any regular
shadow men, really. We've seen them like these ones.
Quaithe is one, but I wouldn't call her regular.
And again, Mary Mazdor's teacher also wouldn't call that person
regular. Don't know if that was a we
don't know the gender of that teacher.
Presumably they wore a mask though.
So the masks are a big deal here.
We've seen masks elsewhere, like with the Brazen Beasts, and the
impact is similar in that it creates some anonymity and some
separation between individuals and groups, but those are all
guardsmen. In the case of the Brazen
Beasts, they're not like they're not the entire culture.
This is like this one that permeates all levels of society,
which is very different. And I really wonder about that.
Got some interesting thoughts here on that.
At least I think they're interesting.
Red lacquer seems to be the common variety of masks.
That is one, the one that Quaithe wears, and she's not
nearly the only one. And that creates even more
anonymity. The more people wear a similar
red lacquer mask, the more uniform it is, the harder it is
to tell people apart. And yeah, you can think of masks
you can think of like shapes and sizes and varieties, like
endless versions, like masking. There's it's it's really truly
infinite, the options there. But if everyone's wearing a
similar like featureless red lacquer mask, which is what
we're told, then that would add to the anonymity.
Surely they're not 100% uniform. There isn't some singular mask
factory that churns out red leather masks for all the
citizens of Ash Eye and the Shadow Lands, but it's very
common and it that speaks to it being a very important cultural
thing because it's also lingered for so long.
One of my theories, my favorite theory is that some traditions
say that or they describe the long night as the sun hiding its
face from the world. So this is maybe a connection.
The people of the Shadow Lands hiding their faces from the
world. This is maybe what I was saying
about like some sort of shame. Like maybe they, they're people,
they feel like we caused the long night.
Our ancestors caused the long night.
This is our this is our shame. We wear these masks because we
don't dare show our faces to the sun because we're the, the, you
know, the sun doesn't love us or something like that.
You know, strange cultural traditions can develop like
that. That would be fitting for this.
Just my idea. I don't know that that's really
it, but something very powerful is.
And I don't mean supernaturally powerful.
I mean some very strongly held belief is keeping this masking
tradition alive for a very long time.
And you might think, OK, well that's not a big deal.
Yeah, it is, though, because masks make you untrustworthy.
If you're in the society that wears masks, you're probably
cool with it, but look at how the Dothraki reacted to it.
They weren't though, although they have at other times.
They weren't reacting to Quaith being a magic user.
They don't like magic users. Like I said, that is a problem
for them. But they were like, no, don't
listen to shadow man, don't listen to the spawn or shadows
who wear masks. They didn't even say don't
listen to her prophecy, don't listen to blood magic, don't
listen to sorcery. They could have, and they had
done that with Miri Mazdor. But instead of referring to her
being a magic user, which was the thing that they spat on
about Miri Mazdor, they were like shadow person, mask wearer.
They were prejudice against that.
They thought, yeah, these people, they hide their faces
from the sun. There's something wrong with
them. That to them was more
distrustworthy than sorcery, which the Dothraki have an
extreme cultural rejection of. They really are against that.
Meiji as well. So it really is really telling
that it was the shadow, the face thing, the mask part that got
them more than the magic and Quaith's example.
Now, there's no such thing as vampires in in A Song of Ice and
Fire as the world of ice and Fire that we know of.
But this is where they would live, The shadow lands, right?
Isn't it the perfect like, yeah, the sun doesn't shine there.
This is perfect for us. Let's talk real briefly about
real world masking tradition and culture because it explains some
of this point I'm making about the shadow lands and how masking
is a really big deal because of it causes other cultures to
distrust and shun and sometimes even within the the same
culture, it causes that. So to continue to allow
themselves to present themselves to the rest of the world in a
manner that causes distrust means they must believe very
sincerely in it or it's very, very important cultural
tradition. We've got a couple of images
here. Shay is putting one on screen.
Masks are so old in the real world, masks are older than
writing, which that's probably not surprising.
Writing isn't that young, but it's pretty old.
I mean, I mean, it's older than like hieroglyphics and and stuff
like that. Probably maybe not like cave
paintings, but it's super old. We have masks that are like 9000
years old that are still around. Like this this one that's on
screen, I believe is that old. There's seashell masks that are
that old. This one on screen was found in
the Israel, Palestine, Jordan area, the so-called Holy Land
before it was the Holy Land. This is This predates that.
This predates any of that stuff one.
Was from 7000 BCE. Yeah, crazy and and still really
creepy then and now. I'm one of those people that is
disturbed by masked figures. Just removing all features is
the thing that by itself that's creepy.
Like when you just have eye like eye holes, that's yeah, that's
creepy, right. And this is what like the the
shadowing do that which they add a little color, they add a
little red lacquer to it. Otherwise other than that, it's
just this featureless like, yeah, that's scary.
Like removing the individuality, removing the identity.
It it looks, it looks wrong. Yeah.
It's like it takes away the elements that make you human.
So it's widely believed by anthropologists slash
archaeologists, both really, that there's far more masks that
are would have been much older than that, but they were
probably made of wood and they're not around anymore.
Wood wouldn't last 9000 years or let alone even, you know, 4 or
5000 years, I don't even know, but certainly not 9.
There's some cultures where judges have worn masks to
protect them from violence to from retribution from the people
they're judging. Not a very popular thing though
in in historically speaking, mostly people prefer that.
The anonymity of judges to not exist.
You, you want to know who's giving out justice?
It's too important to yes, you can understand why you would
want to protect the judges from a a violent constituency in a
lot of different historical contexts.
But also you can see the other side of it where it's like, no,
we got to know who it is that's upholding the law over us.
Like this is a very important power.
We can't just have this person that's maybe it's not the same
person, maybe switching it out on us.
Yeah, one of the most common associations is funeral masks.
Funeral masks appear in many cultures.
I can't even listen. There's just too many, you name
it. Especially because it's
something that isn't necessarily part of their culture from all
time. You might have a culture that
had a couple 100 years of funeral masks being in vogue,
and then maybe time passes and they stop doing that.
And then maybe they come back to it later, like, hey, they have a
Renaissance. Not the Renaissance, but you
know, they, you know, culture can be cyclical, you know, like
certain things are uncool and they get cool again, right?
Fashion is cyclical. Same masks are a extension of
fashion. Many, if not most modern
cultures, though, are hostile to masking, right?
Especially if it's for COVID, right?
It's a lot actually. That's not true.
Really. That was that was mostly an
American thing, but I digress. I'm not talking about that kind
of masking. I'm talking about masking as a
means of changing your identity is hiding your identity or is
taking on a role as playing a character as a religious ritual.
It's a threat to authority though, again, just in the same
reason why people wouldn't want judges wearing masks because it
you kind of kind of it's more important to know who they are
than it is to protect their identity.
The same thing happens here. You don't want thousands or
hundreds of masked citizens just doing things that you have no
accountability for because you can't identify them, because
people walking around in masks, we can't know who the bad guys
are. We can't know who's committing
crimes. Matt, you walk into a bank
wearing a mask, I mean, that's bad.
They're going to think you're there to rob it.
You know, I mean, this has been true for thousands of years, not
robbing banks, but very often masks are associated by people
of means and power with either rebelling against that authority
or coming to take that wealth. The Mongol Empire was extremely
tolerant of all sorts of religions.
That was one of the reasons they were able to spread so far and
wide is that they, even though they were extremely violent to
resistance, they were very tolerant to the day-to-day lives
of citizens. They basically said, hey, you
can work whatever God you want as long as you include the
Mongol Empire. The Khan has to be included in
your prayers. Otherwise go for it.
But they were not cool with masks.
They wiped out a lot of masking traditions that that were in
various different peoples. They ruled they were they were
very anti that Islamic doctrine prohibits figural art or humans
or animals. So you can't have masked, you
can't have like an animal mask or human mask.
It's just against Islamic doctrine or maybe some
exceptions. I'm not an expert, but pretty
straightforward. Now don't confuse a niqab or a
burqa with a mask. That's a that's not a cultural
ritual. That's that's about
subordination, that's about authority.
So that's kind of the opposite. That's the that's in like a the
government mask they they're putting on you to keep you in
control. It's a different kind of thing.
So now China, same thing. Masks are seen as counter
revolutionary in China because they don't fall in line with
communism. Similar things happened under
Stalin, which actually it's kind of funny to think about like you
would think think of like a uniformity might be exactly what
communism is all about. But no, it was actually people
who would stand up to communism didn't want to be identified.
Right. It's the same thing you want to
be. I don't want to I want to be
able to strike against the government and then fade into
the population. And you can do that in a low
tech environment with masks where especially when there's
lots of people that have masks and you've got, you know,
hundreds, if not thousands of masks, individuals that you're
trying to keep track of. You can understand why they
would just ban masks entirely. Say no, no one's allowed to wear
a mask. Then we don't have this problem
at all. Well, they might have other
problems, but not that one. Stalin, same thing.
Stalin was anti mask. Russia's changed in that regard
somewhat. But you know, again, these
things are cyclical. They change the come and go.
But mostly most authoritarian structures, most governmental
structures have been hostile to masks.
Christianity doesn't get along with masking traditions very
well either. Traditional masquerades plays
balls when Christianity started to become more aggressive and
more like telling people how to live their lives, it was these
masquerades were recast by the church as demonic.
It was like, oh, this is the work of the devil.
These masks are devilish. They're demonic.
They're depicting figures that are blasphemous or stand against
Christ, things like that called Pagan and it's it's they were
also done. They were also removed in the
same way that a lot of Christianity overwrote paganism,
a lot of various types of paganism by one of the methods
was well, have a holiday on the same day as an existing Pagan
holiday. We'll set a holiday on that same
day sort of to cross it out sort of, you know, like we'll we'll
have our holiday on the same day and it kind of cancels theirs
out. More people will celebrate ours
and eventually people will forget about that other one.
They did the same thing with masking.
This fusion started to remove traditions and rituals and make
them more about just fun and more about drama and art rather
than sacred rituals, which was what they were more a problem
for authority, right? They don't care.
Authority doesn't care as much about drama and plays and art.
That's when it started to become more accepted.
Carnival comedia del arte, right?
That's an example of that fusion.
Masks there were much simpler. The idea with masks in an
environment like that is, oh, that's the mask of that
character of John or Bill or whatever.
That's how you know, So it doesn't matter what actor it is.
You go, oh, I know that character.
It's the beginning of familiar characters in on the stage that
you don't need to be explained who that is.
You're like, oh, I recognize that character.
I've seen that face before. So the mask is meant as an
identifier. That wasn't as much.
That's not as much of A threat to authority.
But another example of both colonialism and Christianity
pushing aside masking culture is Hawaii.
Hawaii had a big masking culture, not as much anymore.
It was really pushed back aggressively.
There's still a lot of masking traditions in the US, among the
Hopi, the Zuni, the Navajo, the Apache, and the reason some of
these still exist. It's very interesting, partly
because they've carried the traditions, they've serious
about them, but they have managed to preserve them in one
way by forbidding any outside photography or filming of them.
There are no pictures of these masks allowed.
Maybe some of them exist, but you're not going to find them
easily on the Internet, that's for sure.
They're not on Wikipedia, they're not on any articles.
You can't find them anywhere in public spaces like that because
they just forbid it. They some of these same masks
maybe they've used for years or hundreds of years if not more.
But no one's allowed to film them, the masks or the
ceremonies. So there you go.
Keeps it mysterious like ash eye in a way, by keeping it out of
sight of people who aren't, don't belong.
There's exceptions, of course, like a thing like Mardi Gras in
New Orleans. You cannot wear masks in New
Orleans except during Mardi Gras.
I mean, you can wear one like to party costume parties, but you,
there's statutes against it for a lot of reasons.
Like again, because it's, it's a way for lower classes to use
violence or intimidation against upper classes.
And yes, it can go both ways, but This is why they're banned
because it, it's, it hurts the upper class more than it helps
them. Here's another example just
around the world. We, while I was looking at
various masks and stuff like that, it's still popular in
Africa, Central Asia and the Melanesian islands, for example.
There's still a lot of masking that goes on there, a lot of
masking traditions. Japan still is.
Buddhism sort of changed it, but didn't eliminate it, just
altered it. There's one that I think Oshea
has on screen now or is about to this wall of faces.
How cool is that? It looks kind of like the
faceless men. But these are, it just goes to
show these are each of these ancestors.
Each of these masks represents an ancestor.
This this is like these are funeral masks.
And so they are celebrated and remembered.
There are ways to remember the dead.
It looks a little creepy to some people, even to me, but they're.
Guatemalan. Guatemala.
That's right. Thank you for that.
And but to them, of course, to the Guatemalans, I don't think,
I doubt it looks creepy at all. They grew up with it.
It's normal. And it's, it's it's looks, it's
respectful to their ancestry. And it's fitting.
Yeah. Yeah, see, these are masks that
don't creep me out as much, but one, someone isn't wearing it
right now, so there's that. Just seeing them hung on a wall
is different to me and seeing someone walking around in them.
But they all have such personality.
Like, I can see the person memorialized in each of these
masks because they're not, you know, they're.
Trying to look human ish. They're trying to look human,
they're trying to be distinct. Whereas those other masks, the
stone mask, the ancient mask was very personality less.
Unhuman or yeah or it's not like adding either featureless or
they're adding things like horns and just other things that
clearly aren't human like. Stalwart teeth or fangs or
whatever. That's their grandfather.
I see that. That's their grandfather.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's, it's it's a very
different vibe. So you can see this really goes
all over the place with the variety of cultural
understanding, belief, worship, sacred, you know, ancestry, all
the different elements that are present in some degree or
another. Particularly true for the
ritualistic masks and sacred masks are the concepts that we
see with faceless men. Because in those cases, you are
channeling the person of in that mask.
You put on this mask and you're supposed to behave like that
being. You're supposed to like channel
that energy or be that thing or that person, which is what
happens when you wear someone else's skin in A Game of
Thrones. You wear their faceless men's
skin. You feel their emotions.
You already had those flashes of who that person was.
She felt the emotions and pain and suffering of the person that
once wore that skin. It was hers, like the person
that that skin came from. So this is that element is
captured here in a lot of real world societies and has been for
since time immemorial is that you put on that mask and you
become that person or that God or that animal.
Same for performances. I mean, that's true even if
you're just putting on I'm, you know, I'm becoming Joe the the
actor, you know, or Joe the character, whatever my names are
not very creative here. Joe and John, the actors.
Yeah. Good job, Aziz.
So that's how So another element that comes up in fantasy sci-fi
sometimes, well really it's a fantasy thing, is the idea of a
cursed mask. Like you put this mask on and
you acquire that person's personality, but there's some
evil sorcerer, some evil being that that drives you to do bad
things. So let's bring this all back to
Shadow Man again. Even the Dithraki don't trust
them. So this is a way to maybe make
the shadow people that they're so masked and so stubborn about
that it's a such a big part of their culture and they've been
this way for so long. Is there an ancient untamable,
resistant to authority? Masks represent the unknown.
It represents this, this lack of individuality, deities and
powers that are not associated with the state, let alone
controlled by it. It's that all that stuff, the
Reavers and the pirates. So again, it is a little bit
like the Free folk of the Far East where just their all their
values, the way they live, the the environment that they live
in, the actual shadow, all these things seek or combine to make
them a very difficult people. A a people that's unlikely to
self organize into large civilization, unlikely to, you
know, live in cities and things like that.
These are people that are very tied to the nature of the region
they live in. And it's a region that is very
outstanding and if not supernatural, So but but the
other side of this is interesting.
You, you we think of the anonymity, the masks and, and
how we don't have individuality because of that.
But the outfits have the tattoos.
They're covered in tattoos, which like, well, that's not
uniform. I it's hard for me to think that
the tattoos are, yeah, they're all of the same tattoos that
that doesn't really, I don't really believe that it's
possible. Tattoos could look pretty
similar to an average person and a shadow and a shadow man can
see all these differences, but they all look the same to any
normal person. That would be interesting if,
yeah, if they're done in in intricate ways that people from
that culture can tell the yeah, I like what you're saying there.
That's a good call. Yeah.
Like, they that would fit. That works for me.
They they they they're able to tell the differences more easily
than outsiders would. Was like, was that the guy with
the. That's the same like these
tattoos. Yeah.
To be fair, when you see some tribal tattoos I'm I'm in the
same boat that I I couldn't exactly tell the difference
between like certain swirly tattoos.
You're total. I mean, think about the the
running humor that exists with people getting random Asian
characters as tattoos. Like there's a lot of examples
of people that have gotten Asian characters that don't that mean
gibberish. It's like you see like A to
another to a person who doesn't speak that language at all.
That looks cool, just like some Asian characters.
That looks neat, you know, but it actually says like Snowman or
you know. And it says it poorly, too.
Like it looks like it's in Comic Sans, you know, like taboo.
Like I've seen like not only the meaning but often just the tone
of the lettering is so off. Do you realize your tattoo says
hog face? I thought it said, you know,
high intelligence, like, Nah, sorry.
Yeah. So, yeah, it could be a thing
like that where they it means a lot more to them than to
outsiders, and it helps them identify each other in ways that
is not so clear to outsiders. That's pretty cool.
I love that idea. Now, I think they should also be
compared to the Dornish because, yeah, the Free Folk, there's
some strong comparisons there. But the Dornish as well, because
of the mountains and the the temperature, the climate is in
line with Sithorios, so it's probably hot.
I mean, maybe high up in those mountains, it's probably cold.
I'm not. Maybe, almost certainly is.
So there's still some cold weather people probably in the
region. But I think if you're living in
the lower mountains and hills and ground level and around the
Ash River and outside, just generally near the outside of
Ash Eye, it's probably hot. Probably a warm if not hot
region. Hot as hell.
It should be said as well that
they are perhaps a more sorcery oriented people as well.
That's because sorcery is so old in that place.
It's been there for so long and there's so many magic users in
Ash Eye, you'd think that this it's a little more knowledge
floating around, like a few more people that know how to do it,
even if just on a smaller scale. Like I'm not saying there's like
people like calling down thunderbolts left and right, but
more people who have minor scrying or little things of
magic that the the parallels of which don't exist in Westeros.
Not that it's easy to learn how to do it, just that maybe it's a
little easier to find teachers and people who who know how to
do it. That doesn't mean you can master
it, but you there's be more opportunities for that.
For for example, I referred to this earlier Mary Mary Mazdoor.
Here's what she says quote. I learned the way in a shy and
paid deer for the lesson. My teacher was a blood mage from
the shadow lands. Paid deer for the lesson.
So she gave deer. She traded several deer.
How many? How much?
Venison. I'm kidding.
She paid dearly for the lesson. Yeah, What is George RR Martin
does like? Consequences for magic.
That's a big part of his work. He loves the mystery and the
consequences for using magic. Touching on these unseen forces
shouldn't be easy. It should come with a cost.
Consequences are a cost. It sounds like Mary Mazdor did
pay dearly for the lesson. I wonder what that means.
A price like what Stannis paid to Melisandre the the sapping of
some of his life energy to create shadows.
And Mary Mazdor did create shadows.
They were laughing and dancing in the tent as she performed
that ritual on Khal Drogo. And it might be the same shadows
that Patchface is talking about. The shadows come to dance, the
shadows come to play. All that.
Who knows which shadow is such a vague term that pops up in so
many places. That's why we spent so much
talking about it today. So many various types of shadows
and all that. As we discussed in the
Melisandre episode, she learned shadow binding in Ash Eye and
it's only associated there. Remember that other red priests
don't seem to have the skill. It seems to be very much limited
to. That's where you learn how to
shadow bind. Makes sense that the shadow
lands are where you learn shadow binding.
They would have that association.
They'd be the ones who learn to live with it, learn to use it,
learn to manipulate it, learn to maybe have it work for them
rather than just kind of ruin their lives and get rid of all
the food. If people still live there.
It's it's there's got to be some benefit to it.
And the story of Lightbringer, the forging of Lightbringer
involves Nissa Nissa's death. That's a it's very dark.
It's blood magic. Y right.
The sword goes into her heart to make this, make it work to forge
it correctly. Like that's it's pretty dark,
right. That's that's blood magic.
You killed someone to make the sword.
It's it's maybe how Valyrian steel is made too.
So I do think that with their masks and living in fantasy
apocalyptic conditions, it's it's kind of like they're the
equivalent of the nuclear fallout dystopia setting of
sci-fi, You know, like a, a fallout or Borderlands maybe
type setting, if not even a, a setting like a vaguely like a
like a zombie movie film where everything is messed up, but
people have learned to survive there.
And it fits as well that a lot of them are pirates and reavers.
You've got this downtrodden, difficult place to live.
A maybe a place where it's survival of the fittest and
that's what people in the survival of the fittest type
Land's End up doing quite a bit of pirating and reaving and
raiding and all that. We know that they've been a
trouble for ET. The Maroon Emperor is one of the
many dynasties of ET actually moved their court to the place
called Jinky to better deal with them, to have direct access to
fighting them at the border to to confront them directly rather
than allowing their subordinates to deal with it.
So they took a more aggressive approach, a more forward
thinking approach about dealing with this, which must have been
a big problem. It must have been a significant
problem for them to move their court to, to deal with Raiders
and reavers. That's these are serious Raiders
and reavers if you're moving your imperial capital to deal
with them. Yeah, that's that's that's not a
small problem. Karl Karsnar comments and says
Ash Eye is George R Martin's homage to the Gorman Gas gothic
novel series about a giant never ending city castle ruled by
undying elites by British author Mervyn Peak.
Yeah, I've heard of Gorman Gas and I've of course I've heard of
Mervyn Peak and and Mervyn Peak House Peak.
That's the the crossover there, the parallel there.
I should read Gorman Gas. And I do like the giant never
ending castle slash city. That does sound like Ash Eye.
Good call. Once again, I want to remind you
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A couple more items and that'll be it for today.
Some random Song of Ice and Fire threads that I want to tie up
here. As we said, you're on claims to
have been there and of course, Melisandre spent a lot of time
there. So there's definitely some
characters that, you know, have the association that we're
looking for. Also, as I said, Marwin and Mary
Mazdor, but Mary Mazdor is dead, so that's that's a dead end with
her. But the sea snake and possibly
Alyssa Farman, those are characters that we want to talk
about too. To be fair, these characters
probably went to Ash eye proper and not the shadow lands.
But hey, we just don't have that.
I again, I don't think we've seen anyone from the shadow
lands in Lesteros or even the free Cities.
I think as far as I think the base Death Rack is the closest
we get. So let's talk about the seas.
Let's get a little bit of a little bit of fun from him and
start that off with a quote. On his second voyage, SER Corley
sailed even farther east and became the first Westerosi ever
to reach a shy by the shadow, the bleak black city of the
Shadow Binders at the edge of the world.
There he lost his love and half his crew, if the tales be true.
And there as well, in a shy's harbor, he glimpsed an old and
much weathered ship that he would swear forevermore could
only have been Sun Chaser. There's a lot in that one.
His love and half his crew. OK, I have questions.
His love was on his voyage with him.
That's interesting. Was this person a sailor?
Was this someone met along the way or someone who went with
him? Interesting.
Very interesting. And what happened to half of his
crew? Half of them, That's a lot.
I don't think he had a small crew cuz, you know, he had a big
ship and a lot of goals. He wanted to get as much loot as
possible. That's got to involve having
plenty of help. So half of them died.
What of what of just drinking the water, eating the fish,
getting lost as I can't find my way back to the port, The city
so vast I got lost in it. There's a lot of possibilities.
But yeah, I don't know. It's, it's really interesting to
think about this. Some of these would have been
veterans of his that would have been on his first voyage and all
through this long second one up until the point where they
disappeared. So there would have been some
people he cared about, people he had spent a lot of time with,
people that had crossed half the world or all the world with him,
in addition to having been on his previous voyage.
So that's a big deal. And if we get a Seasnake TV
show, this is a whole last season right here.
They could do with that. I mean, that's a that's a full
season I think, not season 1. No, you can't start with this.
But if the show gets far enough, assuming it even happens in the
1st place, well, this would be a big milestone.
If we, we hope if this show happens, we get at least to this
point where he goes to Asha. That would be so cool.
And of course, any showrunner making the show would of course
see that they would look at all the things and be like, Oh yeah,
we got to do that. Sadly, because of the
destruction of his treasures during the Dance of the Dragons,
he wouldn't have any artifacts that he got in Ash Eye unless
maybe they were gifted first. He may have gotten some cool Ash
Eye artifact and given it away to somebody, and that by giving
it to somebody, it would have avoided the destruction that
happened to High Tide, right? What about this last bit though?
He swore that he saw Sun Chaser. That's Alyssa Firemanship, of
course. Now let's look at the timeline
real quick. We don't know for certain that
she made it there, but this makes it sound like she did.
It's an unmistakable ship, a very unique ship.
That's why this claim is hard to reject.
What's his angle if he's lying? I mean, it makes him sound cool,
but it's not like he profits from it, isn't going to make
money from this. It doesn't have any obvious
incentive to lie here other than it sounds cool and him being
such a skilled mariner, the fact that the ship is so unique he
would recognize it. That that's the thing.
Now this would be when he went to Ash Eye.
We don't know exactly, but it would be in the 80s AC,
something like 30 years after the sun chaser left Old Town and
headed West. So it fits like that, works.
The timeline isn't too stretched there.
She wouldn't be super ancient. And of course he didn't actually
see her. He doesn't claim to have seen
her. He just did the ship.
You know, you wonder, did he go looking for her?
Maybe that's where what happened to half the crew or some of
them, they went looking too. And, and in their misadventures,
trying to locate what happened to Alyssa Farman, perhaps to
learn what she'd learned on her voyages.
That's something Corliss would really want to know about.
He would want to find her and and, you know, swap stories.
What like what a meeting of the minds that would be what two
people in the world would have more interesting things to talk
about? Very few that that that would be
an incredible conversation to fly on the wall would be a a VIP
box seat there for that. And again, if they if they ever
do ATV show about this, I would guess very strongly that yes, he
would find her because it's the more exciting result than just
oh, she's not there. Damn, we found the ship, but not
her. There's ways to write that that
would be more interesting. I'm just guessing they would.
It's probably easier to to say, yes, they found an old Alyssa
Farman. She's retired there for whatever
reason. They invent a story about that.
He doesn't want to go back. Maybe they can make a version of
it where she's gone and that's more interesting somehow.
And they find her writings, they find her journals, they find a
daughter or son of hers that would kind of get past the whole
child thing. But this could be an adult,
someone that's, you know, grown up by now.
Again, a lot of times past 30 years.
So, yeah, I mean, it would be hard to find her, but that could
be part of the adventure. That could be part of what
causes this to be a whole season's worth of material.
Exploring Ash I with a purpose trying to find this Westerosi
person. And did they did she find a
passage through the West? I mean, that's huge.
If Corlee's could find that out. Now, we he probably didn't find
that in book cannon because if he had learned about the
possibility of going West and confirm that you could do that,
he would have tried to do it himself.
This was his second voyage going to Ash Eye.
And remember, he did 9 voyages. That's one of the names that was
being kicked around for the name of that show.
So anyway, very possible. Very possible.
OK, so that's the Sea Snake and Alyssa Farman.
And that is basically our episode.
We talked about Melisandre, we talked about Marwin.
We hope there's more from Quaithe.
We hope that these characters give us more on Ash Eye, the
shadow Lands. Safe to say there is more to
come in that regard. Maybe not a lot, but definitely
more. And that's without the possible
and that's without the possibility of TV shows, which,
yeah, I mean, those would be new inventions that might not be
from George. They might.
Some of it might come from George, but who knows?
Who knows when their shows will even get made, if they even get
made. But it is a possible, major
possibility for the expansion of this corner of the world, these
threads, these stories, these with and again, potential for
news stories. Carl, Carl Snark says Odysseus
loses almost all of his men as well.
He told them not to touch those cows.
Hey, good point. Yeah, it is sort of an Odyssey
situation for him, except that he's, you know, venturing out on
purpose. He didn't really struggle to get
home. But, hey, that's a good
connection, a good parallel like that.
Even the weirwoods are kind of wooden masks in a sense.
Yeah, that's true. They are faces because people
look, because the children and the green seers see through
them. They.
They really have that mask vibe because people can look through
those eyes. Very good call.
The trivia question I asked at the beginning of the episode was
which notable character on their way to meet Daenerys is
seemingly not mentioned in Quaithe's prophecy.
As always, the answer is in the episode, and the answer is
Marwin the mage. Again, very interesting.
Quaithe didn't mention him. He's on the way to Danny.
What does that mean? Good job to Chatty Lumpkin.
Who guessed it? Good job, Chatty Lumpkin.
Our next episode is the final installment of this year's
Topics Moot. This was number 11 Nymeria Part
3 Nymeria in Dorne. We've covered Nymeria on her
odyssey in the 10,000 ships episode, which was Part 2 and in
Part 1 called mother Royne, which details the initial exit
from the Royne, the the refugee people and fleeing to Sothorios
and and all that which the details of that, like I said,
are in Part 2. So this is a good time to re
listen to those two. You can find them in our feed or
on our YouTube channel. And because part three of her
conquest of Dorne alongside more is Martel putting sending 6
kings in chains to the wall, Golden fetters, not just regular
chains because they're kings. And a lot of fun stuff there.
It's a great story. Nymeria's very interesting
character. So hope you join us for that.
That'll be a scripted episode and we do those occasionally.
Still in this episode, we mentioned many other episodes
that you could check out. You might be interested in
staying immersed in the world of George RR Martin.
If so, I recommend our Melisandre episode.
That's the most recent of these, the Blood Magic episode.
The Ash Eye by the Shadow episode is a kind of an obvious
one that you could look into. Even though it's a bit old, it
still holds up today. There's not much we would change
about it, if anything. The Great Empire, the Dawn
episode, a companion to that one.
Very, very deep dive into the possibilities of that ancient
civilization such that we know. The Sun Chaser episode, of
course, I mentioned when we talked about the Sun Chaser just
now and the Sea Snake episode. Both of them have their own
episodes and if you want to know more about those journeys, well,
we get into everything we know about them in those episodes as
well as our Valerie Ritas Danny chapters.
You can get only the Danny chapters of our Valerie Ritas if
you join us on Patreon. That's one of the perks is you
get the individual POV's all in one place rather than having to
listen to each chapter. We put them all in one place so
you can get all the Danny, all the Aria.
Not all of them are combined yet, but we're going through
them steadily over the months and weeks, and quite a few of
them are available now, including Daenerys.
So you can listen to only our Daenerys chapter analysis if you
want by joining us on Patreon. And if you're already there,
hey, go find that, listen to it, enjoy, and if you get any new
ideas, let us know. We're always up for discussing
theories and that kind of fun stuff.
Thank you everybody for watching live if you did, or catching the
episode after it was edited and put up on a podcast platform.
Either way, we appreciate you consuming history of Westeros.
Thank you to Nina Krusling for her assistance.
Check her out. A good Queen Alley with
1l.tumblr.com. Thanks to Joey Koval and Jesse
or Jesse. Yeah.
Joey Townsend and Joe. Jesse Koval.
I switched their last names. I hadn't done that in so long.
He used to do that all the time by accident.
It's been a while. It's like ash.
I threw me off. You know, to go forward, I must
go back to for their excellent music in our episodes.
The intro music was written by Joey Townsend and Jesse Koval
made a different version of it. We love that.
Bran the Builder also did that. He made a video intro for us.
So did Michael Klarfeld. So thanks to both of them and we
will see you all next time for more.
You know what to do, Velar Riris.